Marking a blunt break with the filigreed maximalism he nailed on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye's sixth solo album trades smooth soul and anthemic choruses for jarring electro, acid house, and industrial grind while delivering some of his most lewd and heart-crushing tales yet.

Yeezus

Look at the song title "I Am a God" and it seems like easy blasphemy-- Kanye West's update of John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" shocker from 1966. But just as the Beatle's proclamation was fuller and wiser in context-- "I believe that what people call God is something in all of us," Lennon would later explain-- "I Am a God" is not simply the latest self-important blast from one of pop culture's pre-eminent egoists. For starters, the track sounds less triumphant than breathtakingly vexed, crashing in with a gnarled dancehall vocal sample and paranoid sawtooth synths that aim to destroy. Here, Kanye raps about loyalty, respect, threesomes, and, yes, croissants with the urgency of someone being chased by a 30-ton steamroller. The song is pierced by a series of primal screams, pixelated outbursts that are only briefly able to halt the beat's heaving evil. In Kanye's hands, being a god sounds stressful as hell, something we can all relate to, and the song's apparent inspiration is a passage from the book of Psalms: "I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High."
These are the immeasurably lofty stakes Kanye deals in on Yeezus, his sixth solo album. His intensity here has a heightened desperation as he howls into the void, but the Chicago native has always been beguiled by the view from above. Take "Jesus Walks", where he references another Psalm while gasping from on high: "I walk through the valley of the Chi where death is/ Top floor, the view alone will leave you breathless." Then, on "POWER", he contemplates leaping out of the penthouse, "letting everything go." In a way, Yeezus is the panicked sound of that ensuing free-fall, a rush of angst and despair with absolutely nothing left to lose.
The album is something of a razor-sharpened take on 2008's distressed 808s & Heartbreak and marks a blunt break with the filigreed maximalism Kanye so thoroughly nailed on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. In hindsight, the latter record-- with its ingratiating GOOD Fridays buildup, endless guest list, and uncharacteristically apologetic interview sessions-- was his attempt at recapturing a superstar-sized American audience after a slew of entertaining-yet-questionable PR incidents. Except it didn't exactly work: While Twisted Fantasy was universally lauded and went platinum, it still stands as Kanye's worst-selling album to date, failing to produce a top 10 single. But even if it wasn't a chart smash, the intricacy and durability of Twisted Fantasy incubated the Cult of Kanye to an extreme level. "I’d rather piss a bunch of people off and make myself happy than make everyone else happy and be pissed off inside," he told VIBE around the release of 808s. Yeezus doubles-down on this exclusionary philosophy: "Soon as they like you, make 'em unlike you/ 'Cause kissing people ass is so unlike you."
For Kanye, there's purpose in repulsion. And on Yeezus, he trades out smooth soul and anthemic choruses for jarring electro, acid house, and industrial grind while delivering some of his most lewd and heart-crushing tales yet. This is willful provocation that Ice Cube, Madonna, and Trent Reznor could all be proud of. Some of the record has him tackling the same issues he's been rapping about since The College Dropout, albeit with a fire-eyed stare. On his debut's "Family Business", he poignantly lamented a jailed cousin's absence at the Thanksgiving dinner table in a manner "so sweet, like a photo of your granny's picture." On Yeezus, he's still addressing the plight of incarcerated black men, but now he's incensed. With "New Slaves", he confronts us with vulgar stereotypes while exposing the prison-industrial complex for the deeply systemic racist sham that it is.
Meanwhile, XXX creeper "I'm In It" sounds like a dancehall orgasm mired in quicksand and makes previous come-ons like "Slow Jamz" come off like Disney theme songs. "The kids and the wife life, but can't wake up from the nightlife," says the new father on that track's knowingly button-pushing final verse. "I'm so scared of my demons/ I go to sleep with a nightlight." Kanye told The New York Times he's recently reached a new level of Zen, but this is the opposite of beach-chair music. Perhaps the album's most explicit lines are the blurry fantasies of a confessed porn addict who's described his daughter's mother as a "superstar all from a home movie." Without much room for levity, Kanye's complicated and distrustful view of women is unrelenting on Yeezus. And while there's no real excuse for flat oafishness like "eatin' Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce," many of the album's most powerful moments have him broken down, insecure, and bloody, railing against an ineptitude with the opposite sex.
Album pinnacle "Blood on the Leaves" tells a nightmarish story of divorce and betrayal, all while samples of Nina Simone's pitched-up "Strange Fruit" and TNGHT's demonic "R U Ready" horns play yin and yang to the protagonist's alternately sorrowful and furious headspace. "Hold My Liquor" and "Guilt Trip", meanwhile, find Kanye trying to restate his manhood while his emotions crumble around him; if he's not drunk and swerve-y, trying vainly to reconcile with an ex, he's hoping to brag himself out of being dumped. Caustic humor shows up now and then, buoying certain lines or tracks like "Send It Up" and "Bound 2", but it's often fleeting. As on "Runaway", there's something palpably sad about the men in these songs, which twists them away from misogynistic assertions of power toward feelings that are ultimately more self-destructive. As contemporaries like Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Justin Timberlake increasingly devote their music to largely winning tales of contentment, Kanye is unwilling or unable to settle for settling down.
This discomfort is essential to his enduring appeal. For instance, instead of working with giant phone companies to guarantee commercial success, a la his big brother, Kanye's now making a point out of rejecting corporate sponsorship. Whether it's a meaningful stance or a blindly contrarian move is up for debate. But after recent tensions between hip-hop and corporate America, visceral and disturbing lines like "put my fist in her like a civil rights sign" put Kanye beyond the reach of mainstream brands hoping to siphon his credibility. As he told the Times, he's not disinterested in the idea of big companies or big money-- he compared himself to Steve Jobs, after all-- but he wants control.
The restlessness spreads to his aesthetic and collaborative choices. Rather than relying on known hitmakers to augment his music, Kanye solicited ideas from exciting up-and-comers including Hudson Mohawke, Young Chop, and Arca. And even veteran producers involved in the project, like Rick Rubin and Daft Punk, were seemingly chosen not for their name recognition but their history of rule-breaking. In the mid-1980s, Rubin veered away from the colorful, party-starting tones of early rap music and created bare, hard beats for LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C., and the Beastie Boys-- a perfect fit for Yeezus' less-is-more snarl. And though Kanye's blaring, digitized assault couldn't be further from Daft Punk's naturalistic, groove-based Random Access Memories, the artists share a basic philosophy. As Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter recently said of their new record: "We had the luxury to do things that so many people cannot do, but it doesn't mean that with luxury comes comfort."
The idea extends to the how Yeezus treats the human voice. Running with the confounding hook from last year's "Mercy", dancehall patois is scattered throughout, bringing with it that music's sense of menacing confrontation. And Bon Iver's Justin Vernon shows up on a few tracks, using his voice to give the darkness an angelic tint. Expanding upon the cracked vocal experimentation on Twisted Fantasy's "Blame Game", Kanye's own voice is often shadowed by pitched-down ghouls. And though he could've likely chosen any rapper on earth to guest on the riotous "Send It Up"-- probably the most likely, if not only, chance Yeezus has for a rap-radio hit-- he chose Chicago's relatively unknown King L. His presence, along with that of fellow Chi-town driller Chief Keef, makes the message clear: America may want to ignore these young black men from the gang-strewn South Side, but here, they have a voice.
All of these unlikely choices demonstrate how cohesion and bold intent are at a premium on Yeezus, perhaps more than any other Kanye album. Each fluorescent strike of noise, incongruous tempo flip, and warped vocal is bolted into its right place across the record's fast 40 minutes. The precise approach runs through Yeezus' guerrilla-style promotion, too, which found an army of dark vans lighting projections onto buildings around the world, itself a boots-on-the-ground reaction to today's InstaTweet brand of music dissemination. I went to one of these impromptu happenings last Saturday night, in the middle of Manhattan. At 1:20 a.m., the words "NOT FOR SALE" lit up on the south side of the Louis Vuitton building. A few guys ran across the street with Christmas-morning glee, snapping photos. Then, Kanye's starkly-lit visage appeared to recite "New Slaves"'s anti-consumerist lines as cabs streaked by the luxury stores below. His was the only black face to be seen across the jumbo ads lining an eerily desolate 5th Ave. The van soon closed its doors and drove away; the culture bomb’s flash was over in an instant, but the reverberations were just starting to spread.


With a sci-fi concept and a psychedelic sensibility, the NiNE8 Collective member brings a mix of funk, ska punk, grunge, dance, and indie that’s part London, part L.A.

Starface

On Lava La Rue’s jangling new-wave jam “Push N Shuv,” the future collides with the past. La Rue’s vocal takes, recorded when the artist was 21, are a time capsule marking the exact moment they sowed the seeds that would become their debut album. The vocals intertwine with a piercing flute melody, which adds a dash of sci-fi surrealism to the otherwise retro funk groove. On STARFACE, the record that arrives five years after those vocals were recorded, La Rue continues to catalyze the old and the new. The result is a glistening mixture of psychedelic funk, ska punk, grunge, soul, and indie rock.
La Rue—whose stage name is an anagram of their birth name, Ava Laurel (also spelled Aiwa Laurel)—was born in west London in 1998. Raised primarily by their Jamaican grandmother, they entered foster care in their teen years. Surrounded by the punk heritage of the West London estates they lived in, they started a DIY band of their own named the West Borns, which they’ve described as an aspiring “all-girl band version of the Clash.” Later, in school, they met fellow musicians Lloyd Macdonald and Jess Smyth—now known by stage names Mac Wetha and Biig Piig—with whom they formed the NiNE8 Collective. NiNE8 represent a radical proposition in a world of nepo babies: independent, working-class Gen Z artists who insist on splitting all profits equally between them, prioritizing community and collaboration above solo success. Alongside their work with the collective, La Rue has collaborated with artists including Clairo, Deb Never, and Vegyn on their own music—releasing a clutch of EPs blurring their indie, punk, and rap influences since 2017—as well as directing visuals for other artists, including Wet Leg.
Lava heralded a hallucinogenic new era with their 2022 EP Hi-Fidelity, a mellow collection of breezy, trippy funk. On STARFACE, they lean further into that psychedelic sensibility, this time with bolder, braver melodies and a flair for the dramatic. The record hangs around a concept—an alien lands on Earth and learns about the destructive nature of human relationships (or as La Rue puts it, a “lesbian Ziggy Stardust”)—but following the narrative isn’t really necessary to enjoy the record’s plush, omnivorous sonic world. Written and recorded between London and L.A., the record has its feet on the rain-spattered concrete of La Rue’s childhood homes and its head in sunny California skies: Flecks of drum’n’bass and ska bump shoulders with soul, funk, and R&B.
In keeping with La Rue’s collaborative spirit, STARFACE is full of features. Their NiNE8 peers take turns offering uneven but spirited verses on the bass-driven “Fluorescent Beyond Space”; Biig Piig’s feather-light delivery over a rush of Tame Impala-style synths makes a particularly dreamy impression. La Rue also looks outside the collective for creative input, conjuring a queer fantasy with K-indie star So Yoon on “INTERPLANETARY HOPPIN,” and romantically reimagining pirate-radio sounds with Malaysian-Irish artist Yunè Pinku on “Second Hand Sadness.” Meanwhile, on the muscular “Poison Cookie,” La Rue recruits New Jersey rapper Audrey Nuna for a rock anthem with real superhero fight montage energy.
Fusing so many voices and genre elements can sometimes feel chaotic, but for the most part, La Rue makes it cohere. At 17 tracks long, STARFACE is hardly short on effervescent musical ideas, but it sags under the weight of its alien metaphors by the time you make it to the woozy outro of “Celestial Destiny.” Some of the record’s more on-the-nose hooks—“So many humans, and where’s the humanity?” La Rue sighs on “Humanity”—don’t live up to the gravitas promised by their sweeping grunge guitars and luxurious vocal layers. But elsewhere, as on the smooth funk of “Better,” which features Californian bedroom-pop star Cuco, La Rue uses that concise, plain-speaking style to distill hard-won wisdom into a perfectly simple pop hook: “It will not feel this way forever.” It’s clear that Lava La Rue’s ambition as an artist burns brightly. Right now, its light and heat is overflowing, a little messy and uncontained; but the stardust is unmistakable.


Occasionally, copywriters paint themselves into corners. Years ago, some Michigan\n\ salaryman decided Kellogg's Wheats were just too large ...

The Gap

Occasionally, copywriters paint themselves into corners. Years ago, some Michigan salaryman decided Kellogg's Wheats were just too large to handle for an accelerating American culture. Born soon were the Mini-Wheats, painted in glucose shellac for a still further accelerating American culture.
As time passed, the old culture-accelerating pedal was kept firmly to the floor, and before long, Americans demanded a cereal that could at least fit on a spoon or be poured directly into a mouth held agape. Kelloggs' marketing department already had their Mini-Wheats; where could they go from there? Consulting the office Thesaurus, Kellogg's thinktankers fiddled with Bantam Wheats, Lilliputian Wheats, Teeny Wheats, and Microscopic Wheats. Caffeine-burned and frustrated, they finally realized they'd exasperated their Wheats scale decades earlier. The marketers threw in the towel and went with "Spoonsize." Lesson learned: consider the future before throwing adjectives at a product.
If only I'd taken more Marketing classes or gotten past page four of Tony the Tiger Was Hunted and Killed for the Medicinal Purposes of His Ground Penis: The Downfall and Mis-Marketing of Kellogg's Cereal in Late 20th Century Asian Markets, I might have learned from this modern fable in regards to my continual critical relation to Joan of Arc. Live in Chicago, 1999, the predecessor to The Gap, struck me as "horrible," "abysmal," and perhaps, "the worst record I've ever heard." How could I fail to consider another album?!
Yet, Tim Kinsella and Joan of Arc are back with the minimal, random The Gap. Live in Chicago, 1999 was certainly "abysmal," but that word implies a "bottomless," "fathomless," or "infinite" depth of horrible. How can one proceed further than the infinite? But let's skip all this classification and reification of "horrible" and cut to the chase: Joan of Arc make unlistenable faux-art records.
Tim Kinsella has embraced ProTools editing and David Grubbs in a similar technology/hero fetish as Harmony Korine with his digital camcorder and Dogme 95 directors. Both jet-haired, unwashed-looking pretenders name-drop John Cassavetes and Assata Shakur-- Kinsella in the title to The Gap's brief drone instrumental, "John Cassavetes, Assata Shakur, and Guy Debord Walk into a Bar..."; Korine in his tossed-off, cut-and-paste "novel," A Crackup at the Race Riots-- while wrapping their hollow ideas in whatever formless movement currently licks the lobes of the Village Voice.
Lightweight absurdity runs throughout their work with intended irony, but true humanity is never injected to raise the work even a half-notch above pure absurdity. Thus, song titles like "(You) [I] Can Not See (You) [Me] as (I) [You] Can", despite whatever in-jokes or winking, merely frustrate. "Another Brick at the Gap (Part 2)" (there's no part one) and "United Colors of the Gap" similarly hint at satire, but offer quiet wank. The silhouettes against white that comprise the record's packaging fittingly sum up its empty ingredients.
There are two discernable songs on The Gap-- the first and the last-- which are interchangeable. Gentle, haphazard acoustic and/or clean electric guitar pickings trickle over rodent percussion. With the aid of computer editing, the music's spinal matter is spread even thinner. Consider it the first Free Emo record. "Freemo," if you will. The scatterbrain blips and digital hum follow no pattern which would imply a floating, associative stream-of-consciousness concept. But the music is being associated to nothing other than overused post-rock/emo clichés, and is arguably unconscious to begin with.
"(You) [I] Can Not See (You) [Me] as (I) [You] Can" abruptly cuts into awkward silence throughout. The sound of sneakers in a dryer rumbles underneath. Welcome to the future! Of music! Somewhere in the middle of the utterly indistinguishable tracks 3 to 7, a lifelike police siren rises. Perhaps Tim Kinsella realizes his crime, but it's neither amusing or interesting. Jeremy Boyle, playing the "Computer," erodes each track into near nothingness, which is frankly a step up from the previous record. Kinsella's lyrics remain refreshingly absent for the most part.
Joan of Arc comprise a tiny, relatively new niche in underground music. A so-called "art band" on a disrespected, bleached, college-boy pop label that impresses few Wire subscribers, the Arc will never shake their whiny emo roots. Nor do they deserve to. Kinsella might remain the token "difficult" artist in the indie pop collection of University students, but Joan of Arc are as Chicago, low-class, unknown, and unappetizing as Green River cola. The Gap will be their Spoonsize Horrible album.


Two French DJs evoke heartbreak and desolation in a compilation of little-heard gems.

Sky Girl

It’s hard to believe that this compilation was first sold at the impeccably cool Colette boutique in Paris: it has the intimacy of a handmade mixtape, so private and confessional that it could only have been meant for one person's ears. However, this 15-track set was culled by two deep-digging Parisian DJs (Julien Dechery and DJ Sundae), not a heartbroken soul seeking solace in the most lonesome sounds in her record box.
Sky Girl sees wider release this month, thanks to the efforts of the upstart Australian label Efficient Space–and on the surface, there’s little to tie these songs together, though most come from private press albums and one-off singles. They span the 1960s through the early 1990s, Christian folk to exotica to minimal wave. Some songs are propelled by rattled tambourines, others by drum machines, but the beats rarely rise above a murmur. Bosom-heaving strings garland Joyce Heath’s “I Wouldn't Dream of It” while Bruce Langhorne’s 1971 track “Leaving Del Norte” casts a spell with only a dobro in his hand. (The New York folk musician Langhorne is the most recognizable artist here; he soundtracked Peter Fonda’s ethereal western The Hired Hand and was the inspiration for Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”)
A folk current does run strongly throughout. Some such ethereal elements bring to mind Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day and Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms–two obscure, hushed albums that spurred on the freak-folk movement. Linda Smith’s naïf strums and whispers on opener “I So Liked Spring” could bridge the gap between C86 and the K Records roster. But how to classify “Wild Dream,” wherein a lounge band slinks behind Joe Tossini’s affected croon about a rainbow speaking to him in outer space? (It’s hard to even catch that bizarre line over the arcade blips that overtake the song.) Contributions from never-known acts like Some of My Best Friends Are Canadians, Angel, and Karen Marks sound like they borrowed Young Marble Giants’ organ for an afternoon and cut a lone single before vanishing into selective memory. In fact, YMG are the comp’s clearest comparison: spare and haunting music rendered by humans interacting with tape and drum machines, singing clinically as they skirt around unnamed emotional depths.
It’s that ineffable sense of longing, loss and melancholy that gives every song on Sky Girl its haunted pall. Lyrical allusions suggest the intangible, be they dreams, ghosts, or the loss of love. That these small songs actually made it to tape, rather than fading into mist, seems an achievement in itself. Each song doubles as a confession made to the corner of a room.
Sky Girl’s rarest track best exemplifies its overall sentiment: “Sarra,” singer Gary Davenport’s 1983 ode to a girl he was so obsessed with that it dissolved both his relationship and his band. He sat on the pressing so that no one would ever hear it, and it hasn’t been released until now. Only when a friend convinced him to post a few copies online, decades later, did it come to the Sky Girl DJs’ attention. It’s a standard pop song in which every sonic element, from vocals to rattle, sounds cloaked in the base emotions of unrequited love: dejection, yearning, despair, detachment. One pained question of Davenport’s seems to speak also for Sky Girl’s long journey to our ears: “I am drawn into the mist/What is real and what is myth?”


The Newark rapper, Newark producer, and Bronx drill rapper join forces for a 27-track mixtape that fires on all cylinders.

Defiant Presents / Sha EK / Bandmanrill: Defiant Presents: Jiggy in Jersey (ft. MCVertt)

At the forefront of the ongoing club rap explosion is Newark’s Bandmanrill, who alongside producer and longtime collaborator McVertt has worked hard to combine Jersey club’s pep and sped-up samples with the moody theatrics of drill. In 2022, he found a kindred spirit in Sha EK, a more aggressive Bronx drill rapper around the same age. Their chemistry is evident on their joint single “Who You Touch,” where both keep pace with producer EMRLD’s triple-time kickdrums and shimmering guitar, their grit and enthusiasm rubbing off against each other.
Teaming up with Defiant Records, the trio of Bandmanrill, Sha EK, and McVertt commemorate all that club rap and drill have to offer with the 27-track mixtape Defiant Presents: Jiggy In Jersey. For a project of such length, there’s surprisingly little filler. Bandmanrill and McVertt fire on all cylinders, delivering rhymes that are vicious, funny, and reflective when they need to be. The beats are fast-paced and eminently danceable: McVertt is a playful, adventurous tinkerer whose talents show through on tracks like opener “Face Down,” where his jungle gym of a beat gives the verses of A$AP Ferg and Sexyy Red superhuman pomp. Or “Respectfully,” where he’s bouncing plinking synths and bubble pops off of EK’s barks against haters.
It’s a singular, fun vibe that the rest of the album’s producers don’t always match; there are only so many combos of a kick drum pattern and ominous synth line that you can hear before you’ve got the gist. Producers Aston Kain and GKRS come closest to McVertt’s adventurousness on “Fanned Out,” cutting the drums out from under a trilling sample, only to gradually add them back in, ratcheting up the tension with every bar.
Several tracks are remixes of Bandman and EK’s earlier solo and group hits. One of the more successful repeats is of Bandman’s single “Mr. D.C.T.,” which gives Crystal Waters’ immortal house staple “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” that trademark Jersey club stomp; the new version is bookended by a killer guest verse from Brooklyn rapper Maiya The Don, who pops off with spicy wordplay. Meanwhile, Chicago drill rapper Lil Zay Osama tries to hold his own on “Never Want to Be Them, Pt. 2,” but his marble-mouthed raps are overwhelmed by the beat. Better is “Jiggy In Jersey Pt. 3,” a remix where McVertt abandons the minimal thumps of the first two versions for droning synths and drill 808s. It’s one of a handful of times that all three marquee acts appear on the same song and proves just how potent they are as a unit.
Both club and drill music have been watered down in the mainstream since the breakout of their biggest stars, and that’s double true of the East Coast fusion on display here. But imitators can’t touch Mcvertt’s springy, breakneck productions or EK and Bandman’s marathon sprints, which they make it seem as easy as a walk to the corner store for grabba. Hardcore fans shouldn’t be concerned: Jiggy In Jersey gets it directly from the source—no artificial rhythms or preservatives to be found.


One of the most exciting new voices in hip-hop makes her proper full-length debut, doing a lot of singing and not nearly enough rapping.

Pink Friday

Over the past few years, Nicki Minaj has been one of the most exciting new voices in hip-hop. She's delivered a stream of song-stealing or song-saving guest verses, one dynamite mixtape (Beam Me Up Scotty) and another, as good, unofficial one (Barbie World), and generally displayed a swagger, unpredictability, and ferocity not heard from a female MC in years. Little of that, however, is on her long-awaited debut album, Pink Friday.
Minaj turned a lot of heads by coming out of the gate as a supremely confident, powerful MC in any one of the many guises she has chosen to inhabit. She's been most often bracketed with Lil' Kim, but those comparisons are more about image and sexuality than her music; at her best, Minaj on the mic is far closer to the free-spirited, without-a-net work of Missy Elliott. She displays a wide range of talents, stuffing her verses with complex internal rhymes, agile shifts in character and voice, and twisted, offbeat wordplay. Avoiding easy categorization on her mixtapes and guest verses, Minaj has played the coquette, the powerhouse, the lady, the diva, the rapper's rapper, the fembot, and the comedian. She's posed as Rihanna on the batshit awesome "Saxon", played the harajuku Barbie on "Beam Me Up Scotty", and shapeshifted into battle rapper mode on "Itty Bitty Piggy". And while she plays fast and loose with her past, her inclination to slip into a number of characters is the work of a creative former theater kid rather than a myth-making rapper.
And then her debut mainstream single, the rhythmically militaristic "Massive Attack", stiffed-- failing to chart on either the U.S. pop or rap charts. A few months later, the Annie Lennox-sampling hip-hop ballad "Your Love"-- a track she recorded a couple of years ago, most likely as a demo-- became an accidental hit, rising from an online leak to radio. And so now the woman who stole Kanye West's "Monster" from her all-star cohorts spends the bulk of her solo debut singing instead of rapping, leaning on recognizable and often corny 1980s/90s samples, and fronting a series of midtempo songs that inevitably lean into the string-led chorus so popular in R&B these days. In short: The most unpredictable voice in hip-hop decided she wanted to be like everyone else. Fortunately, even when she's aiming down the middle of the road, she's at least better than almost anyone else.
Minaj will get praise for her depth of skills, but this album isn't about showing off a range of talents-- it's about leaning on the ones that have worked in the marketplace. Oddly, she comes out of the gate with the album's most aggressive and most successful run of tracks, so livening up the clattering Swizz Beatz production "Roman's Revenge" that you're tempted to try to repeatedly get through it, even knowing that it contains Eminem recycling his Shady-circa-99 persona. The Bangladesh production "Did It on 'Em" is the record's best track, one of the few times Minaj goes to toe-to-toe with a huge beat. Minaj is upstaged by Drake and Kanye West on "Moment 4 Life" and "Blazin'", respectively, but these tracks-- plus the Rihanna collaboration "Fly" and the solo ballad "Save Me"-- are the best examples of what Pink Friday is rather than what many of us wanted it to be. That quartet of songs is proof that, even with commercial concessions, Minaj could have knocked out a great pop record, though one with anemic singles like "Check It Out" and "Right Thru Me" was never going to be it.
The gulf between Minaj's public persona and her music here reminds me of the criticism laid at the feet of Lady Gaga-- that for all of her high-culture namedropping, wearable art, and big event videos, Gaga's music rarely reflects the full range of her conceptual constructions. Gaga's emergence has certainly stylistically loosed up America's top female stars. Alongside the emergence of Minaj and Ke$ha, Rihanna, Katy Perry, and even the often conservative Beyoncé have enjoyed the license to be more flamboyant and delightfully cartoonish. In most cases, however, their music is in line with current fashion rather than setting it. (That said, the artist here closest in line with the the sound of today's top 40, Rihanna, is also the most consistently excellent; while it's Ke$ha, the one most forging her own path, who is irredeemably awful.) It's almost as if this generation of pop starlets is content to play outsized personalities at awards shows, photo shoots, and videos, yet stay within a sleepy comfort zone on record. Seeing Minaj fall into this rut is particularly disappointing.
The inclination here is to blame the label, but a song like "Dear Old Nicki" reads almost as a defense of what she's done on this album, and that's more disappointing than the actual record. (Perhaps not surprisingly, all four of the bonus tracks spread across different versions of the LP are rap songs; two of them-- "Blow Ya Mind" and "Muny"-- are among the best songs on the record.) A letter to her "old," unhinged, more restless persona, Minaj excuses the decisions she's made on this record because of the money she stands to make from it. "You was underground, and I was mainstream/ I live the life now, that we would daydream," Minaj the R&B star tells her more creative self. It's a deflating song on what, despite being a good modern pop album, is a depressing Nicki Minaj album.

Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment


It is not, strictly speaking, a good record—Eminem hasn’t made one of those in a decade—but his latest boasts enough technical command and generates just enough arresting ideas to hold your attention.

Music to Be Murdered By

The thing you have to remember is that Eminem was on Rawkus’ second Soundbombing compilation. Before he ever shook hands with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, Marshall Mathers battled Project Blowed members and Chicago’s future candidates for alderman. This, after all, was a nasally white rapper from Detroit with a rhyming dictionary and a taste for horrorcore. His first EP from 1997 was sort of staggering, but didn’t exactly scream “TRL.”
If you ran the simulation a thousand times, it would never spit out the actual results: the tens of millions of records sold, the merchandising and the Academy Award and the million little cottage industries. But that’s what happened, and so by 2000, the nasally white rapper from Detroit with a rhyming dictionary had a diamond-selling album that pissed off Bill Clinton and his former group The Outsidaz in equal measure.
It’s tempting to dismiss the endurance of Eminem’s career as the half-life of celebrity, and the man himself as a relic from the Clinton- and Bush-era boom years. But Music to Be Murdered By, released without warning last week, is defined by a certain kind of defiance, and even a peculiar integrity. It’s a messy, sometimes lucid example of a hyper-technical style of rap that fell out of favor and is now creeping back into vogue. It is not, strictly speaking, a good record—Eminem hasn’t made one of those in a decade—but it boasts enough technical command and generates just enough arresting ideas to hold your attention.
It opens with a long notebook dump called “Premonition,” in which Eminem vents his frustration with critics—he correctly notes that he’s been mocked for sounding too tame and too angry on consecutive records—and fans who want him to chase trends driven by rappers half his age. His concessions to this real or imagined pressure have, in the past, been disastrous: 2018’s Kamikaze wastes a Tay Keith beat on a middling “Bad and Boujee” riff, and his adoption of the Migos’ triplet flow on 2017’s Revival (“I conned her into/Ripping the condom in two) was ineffective, to say the least. That’s why it’s so striking when the same fixation yields radically more interesting results here. “Premonition” is followed by “Unaccommodating,” a duet with the inhumanly charismatic 27-year-old Young M.A; “Godzilla” pairs Eminem with Juice WRLD, who tragically died at 21 last month. On both songs, the younger performer sounds freer and looser than the headliner, but each ranks among the most effective cuts.
Eminem sounds even more engaged when fixating on rap from another era. (This is, of course, the guy who has been posing for pictures in King Sun shirts and doing his most inspired rapping over old Black Moon beats.) There’s the moment on “Premonition” when he relitigates a Rolling Stone review of LL Cool J’s Bigger and Deffer; elsewhere he name-checks King Tee and Chi-Ali. “Yah Yah” is built around a sample from “Woo-Hah!! (Got You All In Check)” and makes superb use of a hook from Q-Tip and a verse from Black Thought, who raps about borrowing an eyepatch from the Detroit rap power player Hex Murda. And Eminem’s final verse on the album comes alive when he mocks the idea of listening to “a 40-some bar Lord Jamar verse,” then continues to diss the one member of Brand Nubian—he correctly identifies him as the group’s weak link—who didn’t appear on Soundbombing II.
But it’s impossible to talk about Music to Be Murdered By, like it was impossible to talk about Kamikaze or Revival or The Marshall Mathers LP II before it, without talking first about technique. Eminem once rapped like a drugged-out rubberband, lurching between conversational rhythms and breathtakingly difficult passages. Lately, he just raps...fast. At its worst, this means enduring endless cascades of shout-rapping in the droning, arrhythmic machine-gun style that (generally white) rappers with a fraction of his talent so often utilize, long runs of double- and triple-time flows that bludgeon the song and exist for their own sake. (In one of the handful of genuinely funny moments, he says “I am the top-selling—who cares?/Stop yelling, then stop dwelling.”)
And yet—while it never approaches the schizophrenic rhythms of a “Kill You”—Murdered By does feature some genuinely astonishing technique. On the back half of his verse on “You Gon’ Learn,” he begins rapping on the back half of the beat but never quite slides off into the next measure, and ends by calling a truce with the rappers who he says “can’t even figure out where their words should hit the kick and the snare.” (“You Gon’ Learn” is one of three songs that features a reinvigorated Royce Da 5’9”, who acquits himself excellently on all three; his presence is a frequent reminder that dense, syllable-obsessed rap is adaptable to nearly all eras and production styles.)
The irony is that versions of the verbose, precise style that Eminem favors here have become very popular over the last decade. One just needs to listen to J.I.D, or the more ambitious J. Cole records, or Kendrick when he says things like “legalize your homicide” to grasp the appetite for wordy, athletic rapping in the mainstream today. His influence on Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt has been well documented. Even Juice WRLD, whose popular singles would seem to borrow little from Eminem, was in fact another stylistic descendent: This is a video of him freestyling nimbly over the “My Name Is” beat (“Eminem, Wayne, and Drake damn near made me”). All of this makes it frustrating when Eminem frequently lapses into finger-wagging at the kids on his lawn.
In 2004, Eminem wrote and recorded an entire song from the perspective of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a puppet that had a recurring bit on Conan O’Brien’s late-night shows. The most damning thing there is to say about Eminem’s work since 2010 is that it often makes you miss that sort of specificity. It is maddening that someone who’s exhibited such talent and wit, even on his worst records, defaults so often to the mawkish, mid-tempo stadium rap that has plagued his albums since the comparatively unhinged and anti-pop Relapse. The emotion behind the Skylar Grey-assisted “Leaving Heaven” feels earned—the song is in large part about the death of his estranged father—but it sounds as if it’s been crafted specifically for a video-game trailer. The album is at its worst when it’s at its blandest, especially when it grapples with failed romance (“In Too Deep,” “Farewell”). There is also an almost unbelievable song called “Stepdad,” a murder fantasy about killing a stepdad with a hook of “I, I haaaaaaate/My, my, stepdaaaaaaaad.” But that is such a perfect marriage of subject to form that it might circle all the way around and become transcendent.
The headlines generated by this album deal almost exclusively with “Darkness,” which uses a series of double entendres to tease the reveal that it’s a song written from the perspective of the Las Vegas shooter. Its video ends with a plea for listeners to vote and “help change gun laws in America.” Well-intentioned though it may be, “Darkness” cuts against Eminem’s strengths as a writer and as a vocalist. His best work is brash and irreverent, even when dealing with serious subject matter: See the way he once rapped almost gleefully about the addiction that nearly killed him, or recall the time he taunted, eight months after 9/11, the kinds of kids who would be conned into enlisting. While he still shows the capacity to surprise and exhilarate as a rapper, too many of his songwriting’s eccentric edges have been sanded down and replaced by what is comparatively automatic or, worse, anonymous. On one song, he describes himself as a cross between Blueface and the Boston Strangler—a level of absurdity that Music to Be Murdered By aspires to but achieves only in fleeting moments.

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Bruce Springsteen’s 18th record, High Hopes, is a collection of new recordings of songs he's been playing for 10 or 12 years. They're essentially outtakes from The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream*,* but Springsteen re-recorded them with producer Ron Aniello—often with Tom Morello on guitar—and sequenced them into an album.

High Hopes

Back in 2000, Bruce Springsteen debuted a new song called “American Skin (41 Shots)” at a concert in Atlanta. It was, he claimed, inspired by the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was shot 19 times when four New York City police officers mistook his wallet for a gun. The song was a deeply empathetic response to the tragedy, as a famous rock star tried to see the world from the point of view of both the police officers who work rough neighborhoods and the African American residents who find themselves in danger for even the most harmless actions. Even before many people had actually heard it, “American Skin” sparked controversy, as New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Chief Howard Safir publically condemned both the singer and the song. Particularly egregious was the reaction of Bob Lucente, the head of the State Fraternal Order of Police, who called Springsteen both a “dirtbag” and a “floating fag.”
For his part, Springsteen weathered the uproar stoically. He explained in interviews that the song wasn’t necessarily anti-cop, but he didn’t shy away from making it a permanent addition to his setlists during that tour. A studio version was released to radio stations, but the song wasn’t available commercially until the following year, when it appeared at the beginning of disc two of 2001’s Live in New York City. In the decade since, it has collected dust as a footnote in Springsteen’s late-career catalog—a reminder, when you needed one, that he could still write a powerful and topical song. In 2009, however, he revived “American Skin” and began dedicating performances to Trayvon Martin, and that sad new relevance is ostensibly the reason the song appears on Springsteen’s 18th album, High Hopes, a collection of new recordings of songs that he has been playing for 10 or 12 years. Essentially these are all outtakes from The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream**, but Springsteen re-recorded them with producer Ron Aniello and sequenced them into a standalone album.
The Boss has a famously deep archive of quality songs from throughout his career, so there’s no reason to scoff at the concept behind High Hopes. Fans have been bootlegging these songs for years now, which means the album is aptly titled: There are high hopes for studio versions of almost all of these songs, especially “American Skin”. The new version, though, has stiff competition. The performance on Live in New York City gains its power from the concert setting, with the E Street Band alternating vocals to create a sense of community and Clarence Clemons’ sax solo sounding like a heartfelt eulogy. The studio version from 2001 duplicates that arrangement, only without Springsteen telling the crowd, “We need a little quiet.”
But, unfortunately, the High Hopes recording of “American Skin” highlights everything that’s gone wrong with Springsteen’s music in the 21st century. It’s garish and melodramatic, with a cluttered arrangement and slick production that distracts from its message. The song open with Springsteen singing "41 shots," but his vocals are distorted and distant--a cheap effect. There is some industrial percussion that would have sounded dated in 2000, and there is Tom Morello’s guitar solo, which could have been cribbed from some third-tier 80s power ballad. In 2013, the song is too aware of its own import, which means it strains for the same sense of gravity that once came easily. Live, Springsteen was able to play up the contradictions and colliding perspectives fueling the country’s race problems, even implicating himself in the process, but now his outrage has curdled into something like dulled resignation.
Springsteen has struggled in the 2000s to find the best musical vehicle for his thoughts on the state of America. Live, the E Street Band can be a powerhouse, as the sexagenarian continues to exude charisma and energy on stage. The studio, however, is another thing. Nebraska aside, Springsteen has never been a minimalist, but his recent output has been maximalist in all the wrong directions. Rather than the Spectorian wall of sound he perfected on Born to Run and The River, he now dabbles in studio gimmicks that sound both expensive and dated: vocal distortion, caked-on production, pots-and-pans percussion, inert drum loops, a puzzling fascination with Celtic flourishes. On High Hopes the thick arrangements distract from the good songwriting and conceal the bad, often to the extent that it’s impossible to discern which is which.
The result is an album that often sounds salvageable but continually trips over its own ambitions and good intentions. On “Heaven’s Wall” the gospel choir overwhelms the song completely, disrupting the careful cadence of the verses and any nuance the lyrics might carry; rather than righteous, it comes across as self-righteous. “Harry’s Place” is all setting and no story, with details borrowed from an Elmore Leonard novel. Most tragic may be the closing cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”, which begins promisingly with Springsteen’s gravelly voice and an accordion mimicking the New York duo’s gutter drone. It’s a quietly powerful moment, but you just know he’s going to do something to ruin it. And sure enough the song builds to a manufactured climax full of corny drum loops and gloppy strings.
Springsteen is too much of a control freak to escape blame, but perhaps most culpable is Tom Morello, who is apparently a member of the E Street Band now. For the last few years Morello has grown seemingly embarrassed by his rap-rock history with Rage Against the Machine, when making his guitar sound like a turntable carried some cultural weight. He does share with Springsteen a few populist heroes, namely Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck. Otherwise, they apparently have little in common beyond their politics, and Morello sounds awkwardly fitted to these songs. He shreds gracelessly through the cover of the Havalinas’ “High Hopes” and clutters “Heaven’s Wall” with squall and distortion. When his guitar isn’t disruptive, it’s simply superfluous. Often it’s just dumbfounding: his solos on “The Ghost of Tom Joad”—which gets a passable cock-rock makeover that owes a debt to Rage Against the Machine’s cover—sound like David Gilmour sitting in with Cinderella.
An unwelcome presence, Morello is simply the most obvious of many elements on High Hopes that just don’t work. It’s all the more unfortunate given that there are actually some redeemable songs here, along with some brief glimpses of Springsteen the rock'n'roll storyteller. Even as he eclipses 60, he’s one of the few rock veterans still concerned with actually rocking, which he does convincingly on “Just Like Fire Would” and “Frankie Fell in Love”—two negligible songs that you might dismiss on a better album. Here they sound actually feisty and even ribald, with a fire that is squelched on the more serious numbers. I can’t tell if those highs actually redeem the album somewhat or make it even more of a disappointment, but I do know that the out-in-the-streets details of “Frankie Fell in Love” are more humane and meaningful than the grandiose philosophizing of “Hunter of Invisible Game”. Instead of trying so hard to live up to the times, perhaps he just needs to work on capturing a moment.


Departing from the high-impact electro of his Galaxian alias, Scottish producer Mark Kastner explores more contemplative strains of ambient and IDM.

Like Sunlit Threads

Not three minutes into Like Sunlit Threads, the Scottish producer Mark Kastner tells us he’s disappearing. Amid the hum of rainforest fauna, his voice pitched down, he describes feeling as though he’s “turning to smoke” and becoming “the faint wisp of a cloud.” The words come from the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s diary Fragrant Palm Leaves, which sometimes makes nothingness sound less like a blissful state of mind than a weird holiday from yourself. Perhaps this is the trip Kastner has in mind. His previous music, under his Galaxian alias, has been anything but meditative. On EPs like Blowback and NU-1000, a 2016 collaboration with DJ Stingray, Galaxian established a high-impact electro sound of face-rippling speed and intensity; he performs in a fighter pilot’s helmet, and his music often mimics an especially risky set of barrel rolls and nosedives. On Like Sunlit Threads he adopts a new alias, Kas, and gives us something more varied, and far more subtle: a nihilist’s guide to mindfulness.
This idea is most clearly expressed across the album’s ambient passages. On tracks like “Last Silence,” a cyberpunk-adjacent air of lowlife gloom mingles with spiritual yearning. In a similar mode, “Outwardly Attaching,” a piece suffused in stargazing awe (and unlikely French horn) emits campfire warmth. But a spike of anxiety is never far away. In “Self-Aware Field Pt. 1,” slo-mo nausea crescendos with murder-hornet strings; “Pt 2” guides a queasy sinewave tone toward a frozen summit of glassy keys and stern bass chords. These austere, suspenseful pieces are reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s mystic atmospheres. The railroad chug of “Last Silence” brings to mind this scene from the 1979 film Stalker, which also happens to illustrate a transition from one world to another.
Writing in Fragrant Palm Leaves, Hanh describes encountering a moment of clarity as a “battlefield,” the site of a struggle for personal growth between his old and new selves. Listening to Like Sunlit Threads, you could say Kastner loves the fight as much as the revelation. “Holographic Matrix of Information Totality,” a beat maze of vulcanized surfaces and coil-sprung percussion, is a great example of Kastner’s typically morose yet thrill-seeking sound, a sort of doom funk that could also describe a kindred spirit like Christoph De Babalon. But similar tracks on Like Sunlit Threads are, notably, a notch down from the ultra-manic likes of Galaxian’s “Glasgow to Detroit”—a standout on Helena Hauff’s Kern mix of last year—whose car horns and bumper-crimping pile-ups suggested a rough commute for everyone except a Gumball Rally driver.
On the excellent “Mystery Beyond Mystery,” Kastner sounds inspired by the chance to shift down a gear. Where the track’s god-ray pads and needlepoint pulse might normally prime an explosive breakdown, Kastner simply lets all that pent-up energy leak. There are other surprises, too. From “In the Absence of Becoming” on, Kastner dapples the music with a guarded optimism, if not happiness. That track’s glazed digi-string harmonies, especially, suggest a close-to-nature spirit redolent of fellow Scots like Boards of Canada or Firecracker Records. And “Deeply Rooted Peace” is a real beauty, with more Hanh-sourced monologue echoing over oneiric chords that rise and swirl like a flock of starlings. On this tender capstone to Like Sunlit Threads, Kastner sounds at home in a gentler kind of oblivion.

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Nevermen is a trio consisting of TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, Faith No More's Mike Patton, and Doseone. Nobody's accusing this group, who have been working since 2009,  of being short on ideas, but flitting from one chrome plaything to another gets exhausting quickly.

Nevermen

Back in 2009, Idaho poet-rapper Adam Drucker (aka Doseone, also of Themselves and Subtle) announced the birth of a hydra known as Nevermen, a collaboration between himself, Faith No More's Mike Patton, and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. The trio of frontmen were to be joined by visual artists the Chapman Brothers, two members of the Young British Artists movement, whose job was to translate the music to a visual medium. Seven years of silence later, the Chapmans are out, along with the project's multimedia ambitions. But not this 10-track album; they've kept their word.
Nevermen may only be a trio (and a trio of frontmen, natch) but each member of the group brings an unexpectedly diverse stylistic palette to the record. Adebimpe represents the weird-yet-relatable world of indie rock, while Doseone offers lyrical abstractions like "barbed wire on pollen" and "man hands on fire" as if they've been on his mind for days. And, of course, there's Patton: As the ringleader of a hard rock band known for genre experiments—not to mention a chronic collaborator who's worked with everyone from Norah Jones to Dan the Automator—there's nothing the chameleonic Patton can't do, and his fingerprints are all over Nevermen: on "Non Babylon"'s extended, faintly-operatic outtro (a freakout that wouldn't feel out of place on Faith No More's recent Sol Invictus), on the carnal, Slick Rick-referencing "Treat Em Right" (the chorus? "Treat 'em like a prostitute") and all over the mixing boards, which belie Patton's penchant for sinister contrasts (glitzy funk against distorted industrial samples, seas of guitar strata that engulf all rhythm and melody).
Indeed, Nevermen's a very Patton-y album, coming off alternately as the poppy spiritual descendent of Mr. Bungle, or, on the weaker tracks, an unfocused, ornery answer to Peeping Tom—but where Patton yowled all over those releases, he's less of a vocal presence on Nevermen, which gives Adebimpe and Doseone's voices more attention. Rather than encourage his partners' cartoonish mischief, Adebimpe acts as referee, constructing his melodies to act as both common ground and common sense. As with TV on the Radio, his role in Nevermen lays in function rather than finesse, clarity over crescendoes—so it doesn't come as a huge surprise that his humble hooks on tracks like "Mr. Mistake" and "Tough Towns" rely on chirpy, garden-variety melodies. Were it not for Adebimpe's restrained, ever-so-atonal hook, "Shellshot" would collapse under the weight of its own edginess long before the ghastly Linkin Park outro; a similarly glam, glib refrain redeems "Treat Em Right," and his adamant "to the hell NO!" on "Dark Ear" is the closest Nevermen come to a fist-pumping, lighters-up moment.
Nobody's accusing the band of being short on ideas—after seven years, they've assembled an extensive playbook indeed—but flitting from one chrome plaything to another gets exhausting quickly, especially when the toys in question are post-grunge, glitchy rap-rock (remember Flobots?), and impassable swathes of steel-wool synths. Imagine three demonic, wailing brats yanking you by the wrist through the toy store, straining in every direction to grab every last bauble off the shelves and shove it in your face: That's what listening to Nevermen is like. The album's best songs ("Tough Towns," "Fame II the Wreckoning," "Treat Em Right") temper the stream-of-consciousness and ramp up the atmosphere instead. When they resist the urge to troll (tell me a sardonic chorus that goes "Just like a tactical maniac/ I WANNA SHOOT YOUU" isn't trolling), Nevermen possess a deadly grace befitting Doseone's beloved hydra metaphor; for now, those necks are tangled.


Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom.

Melodrama

“Fluorescent”—has there ever been a better descriptor for first love? When Lorde sings it to the empty space beside her on “Supercut,” toward the end of her shining record Melodrama, we share a bit of her noted synesthesia: We see that bright, electrode glow of possibility, feel its siren shine on our faces. That neon is too beautiful to last, though; its buzz requires an effortful chemistry.
But when it is gone, the rest need not pale by comparison. The same could be said for one’s teenage years, which the 20-year-old Ella Yelich-O’Connor exits so graciously on this album. That formative era is a fraught time for girls, a dizzying span in which they’re most sought for beauty and cultural cachet yet their perspectives are forcefully minimized. Hear a song from a singer who taps their first euphorias, but know it’s merely real adults’ “fetishization.” Try to understand your ever-changing physiology, then have a porcine politician insist that it’s not yours to protect. And the growing pains feel endless; while it is horrible to be a teen girl who isn’t taken seriously by society, it’s even worse being a young woman unsure what to do with the autonomy that threatens it.
Melodrama is Lorde’s study of being a young woman finding her own conviction in unsteady circumstances. Sometimes, this also involves being single—a breakup and a raucous house party serve as thematic through-lines—but romance is only part of the album’s script. In the difficult, exhilarating course of the record, written largely when Lorde was 18 and 19, her true reward comes with her embrace of self. As a nod to her clearest pop forbearer, her peace is in accepting that she will, sometimes, end up dancing on her own.
Like her 2013 debut Pure Heroine, Melodrama is a work of sleek self-possession, packed with bursts of peculiar rhymes and production that confound expected song formulas. However, while Heroine cast off the trappings of materialism atop spacious trip-pop, Melodrama catches the mist off of New Wave rhythms that befit the name. (Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, in his first production for Lorde, leaves a pliant and romantic thumbprint throughout; Heroine veteran Joel Little also returns.) Its first single and opening track, “Green Light,” casts a long shadow in its anthemic bliss. There’s a reason Max Martin called the New Zealander’s approach “incorrect songwriting”—by no Top 40 rubric should her song fire off, within its first 60 seconds, a spectral synthesizer wobble, a strident line of house piano, a subterranean vocal plunge, and an apropos-of-nothing gear shift that feels like storm clouds ebbing to the sun. Her lyrics, too, occupy an underexplored space; reams have been written about volatile breakups and last-call debauchery, but Lorde rages in a self-aware hedonism, reckless in grief yet knowing that tomorrow her heart will begin to heal. (“But I hear sounds in my mind/Brand new sounds in my mind,” she exults, after thoroughly mocking the bastard in falsetto sing-song.)
This breakup continues to provide fodder in her keening, Kate Bush falsetto warble on “Writer in the Dark” and the creaky, atonal electronic rasp of “Hard Feelings/Loveless.” When she sways alone in “Liability,” wondering if she’s too complicated to find love, it is heartrending and uncomfortably relatable. But the album is no saccharine journal entry by any means. Her party has pills, dresses rumpled on the floor, no absence of profanity, and a sense of humor, too: the moxie it takes to not only acknowledge your extravagant emotional contortions, but wink at them drolly by calling the whole thing a Melodrama.
Her percussive delivery, both in her smoky lower register and lean falsetto, cuts sharpest in the bacchanalian bangers. “Sober” folds humid brass into a stutter that lightly recalls her Heroine hit “Royals,” along deft turns of phrase that suggest even in her imbibing, she’s too sharp to turn off self-scrutiny (“Midnight, lose my mind, I know you’re feeling it too/Can we keep up with the ruse?”). She’s a touch self-deprecating in the height of the party (“Homemade Dynamite”) and tenfold pensive as it wears down (“Perfect Places”). The record’s bittersweet trajectory feels not unlike Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, intent on capturing both the carousing and the come-down in one breathless spree.
And the places Lorde goes on Melodrama really are special, particularly “The Louvre.” This track, in its gleaming synths and heartswell harmonies, captures an immersive bliss, a shared frequency of love just as irrepressibly grandiose as its sound. It’s the kind of connection that, even once it’s gone, lightens your bones forever. Whatever the next “Gossip Girl” is—whatever soapy serial next attempts to harness the teen zeitgeist with plush fabrics and sharp cheekbones—“The Louvre” will probably soundtrack its climactic moment. But as Lorde’s voice rises in it, awed in adoration as she whispers, “Well, summer slipped us underneath her tongue/Our days and nights are perfumed with obsession,” whatever’s onscreen can’t match her luminosity. It’s not enough to say Lorde is one in a generation. Really, it’s amazing this is the first time she was a teenager for how good she was at it.


Curated by and largely featuring Kendrick Lamar, the soundtrack is a diverse, daring, and holistic pairing with the blackest movie in the Marvel Comic Universe.

Various Artists: Black Panther The Album

Black Panther The Album

The film Black Panther is not the first black blockbuster, or even the first black superhero movie, but there has never been a movie on this scale directed by, written by, acted by, and designed by black talent. In the wake of campaigns to diversify cinema and disrupt the Hollywood hegemony by hiring more people of color, lofty expectations have been placed on a film of this magnitude. Helmed by Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed) and starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, and Lupita Nyong’o, the film has put blackness to the fore and there are hopes that this production will build on recent wins like Moonlight and Get Out to usher in a more inclusive industry. It’s quite a bit of pressure for a man in a panther suit.
Black Panther follows T’Challa (Boseman), protector of his homeland Wakanda—a fictional African nation—fighting to earn his recently inherited kingship. The verdant Wakanda produces Vibranium, an ore that makes the country the most technologically advanced civilization on Earth and a world leader in weapons manufacturing. But the self-sufficient nation has remained hidden from the rest of the modern world for generations. T’Challa is tasked with handling Wakanda’s transition out of the shadows and Kendrick Lamar has been tasked with bringing rap to Wakanda.
Coogler, who always wanted to work with Kendrick on a project, essentially got a full-length Kendrick Lamar album out of it. Kendrick and Top Dawg CEO Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith curated and produced the album with in-house producer Sounwave, and they sat down with the film’s composer Ludwig Göransson to work some songs into the score. Coogler selected Lamar because the themes in his music—foremost on that list: blackness as an identity, spirituality, power dynamics, self-doubt, and the onus of kingship—align with those in the film. Some of the music is from the movie, some is merely inspired by it, so don’t expect to see Wakandan tribal dances performed to 2 Chainz one-liners. But despite all its moving parts, and its by-the-numbers singles, Black Panther The Album is finely-tuned, aware of its audience, its objectives, and the stakes.
Black Panther The Album is at its best when channeling Wakanda’s innovative spirit and self-sustaining ethos, characteristics we have already come to associate with Kendrick. He is one of the most ambitious MCs there is, a rapper of nearly unlimited potential who operates like a well-oiled machine. Kendrick has five official features on the album, but he appears somewhere on every track. Being a soundtrack for a Disney-backed superhero movie, it was never destined to possess the boldness and urgency of his solo work, but it often feels monumental. When it isn’t radical in its sonics (like incorporating the robotic whines of James Blake into a calypso-ish tune on “Bloody Waters”), it’s radical in its casting, enlisting diverse guests and forming unlikely pairings with mostly wondrous results.
The opening title track finds Kendrick at his most explosive. The beat erupts beneath him as he draws parallels between his own internal conflict and T’Challa’s, weighing the burdens that come with being a leader of people. On the audacious “King’s Dead,” Kendrick takes on the role of T’Challa’s nemesis, Killmonger, shirking those same duties. “Who am I? Not your father, not your brother/Not your reason, not your future/Not your comfort, not your reverence, not your glory,” he fires off. Each song works as a movie narrative device at its most rousing.
Some tracks sidestep experimentation and big ideas for more generic and pop-friendly vibes. There have to be some hits, after all. Even with an amended SZA verse, “All The Stars” is still underwhelming, its artists acting as stand-ins, supplying heavy-handed plotting and everyman cliches. The flute-led “Big Shot,” with its whiny sing-song and forgettable Travis Scott verse, is a misfire. And the album-closing tag-teamer, “Pray For Me” with Kendrick Lamar and the Weeknd, is just a watered-down reanimation of the Tesfaye’s recent solo work—Starboy-lite. These may look like big-budget set pieces, but they come off as set dressing.
Elsewhere, though, when untethered to story or chart-landing constraints, the album is hugely satisfying. There’s the slapping, DJ Dahi-produced “Paramedic!” which introduces the Vallejo foursome SOB x RBE to the world with punchy raps that jump up out of the pockets. “X” opens amid amped-up shit-talking (”Not even Kendrick can humble me,” Schoolboy Q chants, defiantly), then inverts the beat for the silky 2 Chainz verse. Ab-Soul delivers some of his best raps in years on “Bloody Waters”; in his solo work, he can get bogged down spelling out his more zany concepts, but here he simply follows the script provided for him, uncorking his signature wordplay.
While TDE and friends perform at high standards, Africans rule Black Panther The Album and dictate the pace of every track they land on. Self-professed gqom queen Babes Wodumo is in her element on “Redemption,” doing call and response and swaggering through her verse. Johannesburg alt-rapper Yugen Blakrok steals the show on “Opps,” outmaneuvering K. Dot and Vince Staples: “Spit slick, attack is subliminal/Flowers on my mind, but the rhyme style sinister/Stand behind my own bars, like a seasoned criminal/Gotham City Streets, I’ll play the (Riddler)/Crushing any system that belittles us,” she raps. Sjava sings his whole verse in isiZulu on “Seasons,” as the rapper Reason and Sacramento native Mozzy break down racial inequity. With its rotating international lineups, the TDE cultural exchange program delivers collaborations as enriching as they are surprising.
The tie-ins to the film can be tenuous, but Kendrick and company bring 50 minutes of big-time team-ups and crossovers scanning black music across three continents: rap, R&B, gqom, Afro-soul, and pop from South Africa, throughout California, London, Texas, and Ethiopia by way of Toronto. The album is a sampler of the film’s broader vision of black excellence. It’s fitting that this slightly convoluted, sometimes generic offering largely delivers on its promise, much like the larger comic world it now occupies. A fun, rap-centric album is now Marvel canon. In their first roles as bit players, the TDE roster delivers a product benefiting the whole. Their effort is one befitting the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its blackest entry.

Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope


The sprawling second album from the crystal-voiced singer-songwriter is a riot of moods. Moses Sumney widens the scope of his work and takes full account of his self, warts and all.

græ

Last December, Moses Sumney debuted a video for a love song called “Polly” from his newly announced double album græ. It was about as unadorned a video treatment as possible: Sitting in front of his computer’s camera in a black t-shirt, framed by a white wall and some guitars, Sumney stared into our eyes while the song played. He did not lip sync as usual. Instead, he took a few deep breaths and began to weep, tears running down his cheeks. Every so often he gulped for air, but otherwise he remained still, and he never broke eye contact. Halfway through the song, he brushed his tears with his palm, a radiant smile escaping, his eyes warming. As the song played, its chorus stripping back longing to its pulsing root—"see see see see me"—he seemed to pass through something elemental and emerge on the other side, transfigured.
This facility for naked emotional connection is a kind of superpower, for good or ill, and Sumney has wielded his with grace. It’s the most significant of his many, many gifts, including his astonishing singing voice, which can plead like Prince or ascend to ANOHNI or Thom Yorke heights. He’s been overwhelming new converts ever since he opened for the R&B trio KING in 2013. He spent the next several years deciding what to do with the vast possibilities his talent afforded him. Sidestepping a cresting wave of industry attention better known for ruining careers than starting them, he waited until 2017 to release his starlit debut Aromanticism on the indie label Jagjaguwar.
That album, though decked in swirling string and horn arrangements, was quiet, intimate, and burned with the intensity of a few glowing embers. The most significant element in the mix, after his voice, was silence. He seemed at rest, drawing in one great breath and waiting for the moment to exhale. There was more to come, the album hinted, more to say, but not yet.
On græ, he lets out everything inside of him. The album is bigger, in every sense—longer, for starters, a 20-song double album that Sumney saw fit to release in two parts (the first half of the album appeared in February, the second arriving only this week.) Where Aromanticism was intimate and sleek, græ is rangy, sprawling, a riot of moods from lustful to angry to broken-hearted. He has summoned a battalion of collaborators, including production from Daniel Lopatin, basslines from Thundercat, saxophone from Shabaka Hutchings, horn parts from the English art-rock group Adult Jazz, writing credits from James Blake and author Michael Chabon. The camera lens zooms out from dewdrop to mountain range. Everything Sumney’s ever done or tried to do is here.
“Virile,” the single that preceded “Polly,” is in many ways more representative of the album’s omnivorous ambition. In the video, Sumney convulses across the fog-swirled floor of a meat locker, his body as flawless as a marble statue while carcasses swing behind him on hooks. The lyrics are a withering send-up of the pointlessness of toxic masculinity in a world where the body inevitably turns “to dust and matter.” “Cheers to the patriarchs,” he sings bitterly over bludgeoning stabs of guitar from Noah Kardos-Fein of the NYC noise-rock duo Yvette and string arrangements from Rob Moose. Like Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas, Sumney mingles the cerebral and the carnal, eroticism and disgust, until the sensations are indistinguishable.
He also shares Hadreas’ yearning to escape his own shell. On “Gagarin,” which interpolates a piece by the late Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson, Sumney sings in a pitched-down voice of wanting to “surrender my life to something bigger than me.” (The title is a likely reference to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel to outer space.) Sumney's voice pours like tar onto the sound of a jazz piano and eventually the whole track turns ectoplasmic. The final minute sounds like the birth of a universe, with synths streaking like stardust before melting down amid the formless cries of Sumney’s digitally altered voice. The HD sheen of the mix—you can practically see the air tremble around the cymbal splashes—is a bold contrast with the formless abstraction of the music, like a private-press 1970s new age record remastered by Dr. Dre.
Though he might not harbor their commercial aspirations, Sumney shares some of the precision and remove of auteur figures like Dre or Trent Reznor. He controls every aspect of his art, from his flyers to the art direction of his videos, and so his music arrives seemingly whole and untouched from a different universe. It also means his work can feel a little cool to the touch, even when his lyrics are strictly autobiographical (“I had two dogs in 2004” is a good representative lyric). His voice is an instrument of pure beauty, a falsetto so dazzling he could trace a cathedral with one syllable. It also tends to turn his words into color, mere vehicles for him to cast light and shadow against the wall. The music is gorgeous, an empty word that often points to the missing thing in Sumney’s work: The stray hair, the smudged line, the wrinkle on the outfit that proved somebody once wore it.
Running through the album are the sampled vocals of the Nigerian-Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi, whose ruminations on multiplicity and identity glue together the album’s edges. “I really do insist that others recognize my inherent multiplicity, Selasi says on “also also also and and and.” “What I no longer do is take pains to explain it or defend.” The dreamy piece culminates in a manifesto of sorts: “I am aware of my multiplicity, and anyone wishing to meaningfully engage with me or my work must be, too.”
These pieces probe the album’s underlying consideration: How to account for your whole self, not just the pieces that you feel comfortable offering to others. For Sumney, the most precious commodity is space—space to test out your voice when no one else hears it, space to struggle your way towards self-definition. Despite his emotional transparency, Sumney seems a little ambivalent about unbridled self-expression: “Bystander” is a wry ode to the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut. “Honesty is the most moral way/But morality is grey,” he observes, in one of the album’s most tenderly sung lines.
The most powerful moments on græ examine the distance between this wariness and the loneliness it produces. “I am not at peace with dying alone/But I am not at war either,” he sings on “Neither/Nor,” a negation that might be Sumney’s most resounding statement of self. His music is unique in the chilly way it yearns for warmth; he can often be coy, flirtatious, beseeching. “Sometimes I want to kiss my friends/You don’t want that…do ya?/You just want someone to listen to ya/Who ain’t tryna screw ya,” he croons on “In Bloom.” The stacked harmony vocals bear down on the line “Sometimes I want to kiss my friends,” and it proves as indelible, and maybe more meaningful, than his ideas about patriarchy or creative sovereignty.
For all of græ’s high points, for all the elasticity of its ambition, Sumney’s most exalted work still happens at the emotional distance of the “Polly” video. “Polly,” like all of Sumney’s most devastating and resonant music, exists only by the grace of his calloused hands fingerpicking a simple pattern and his voice, which does more to generate cosmos than all the prodigious talents on græ combined. The album highlights—lullabies like “Lucky Me” or “Me In 20 Years”— come from a place where Sumney often finds himself: his glittering voice, resplendent and alone, aching in solitude. This is the range of the coffeehouse whisper, his hand atop yours on the table. This is still where we feel him most.

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The Documentary 2 is the sequel to the West Coast rapper's 5 million-selling breakout debut. Featuring Future, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, and others, it continues the strategy of that album and his subsequent ones: hitch the Game to the greatest possible number of bandwagons and hope it moves.

The Documentary 2

This year marked the 10th anniversary of The Documentary, meaning it's also been a decade of the Game reminding us he was once involved with a record that sold 5 million copies. "Involved with" feels like the right terminology: Given that the production credits alone list Dr. Dre, Scott Storch, Kanye West, Cool & Dre, Havoc, Just Blaze, Timbaland, Hi-Tek, Jeff Bhasker, and Buckwild, it would be extremely misleading to say Game "made" The Documentary. He’s tried to reverse his subsequent free fall with an exhaustive array of desperate, attention-seeking tactics, and calling his new LP The Documentary 2 could be the final Hail Mary: if he’s mortgaging the goodwill from his most successful record on something that’s no different than LAX or The R.E.D. Album or Jesus Piece, there won’t be a Documentary 3.
The Game’s last three LPs debuted, respectively at #2, #1, and #5, even with all of the dud singles that embedded their ignominious future prospects right into the first listen. Most would consider that a pretty decent run all things considered, but those albums all were modeled after *T**he Documentary—*hitch the Game to the greatest possible number of bandwagons and hope it moves. That continues on The Documentary 2, which features Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Future, and Kanye West. But they don’t really show fealty to or chemistry with the Game—he’s more like the rich kid in high school whose parents are always out for the weekend. "100", the Drake feature, is Game’s first charting single since "Celebration" in 2013, and it’s a pleasure to hear Drake spit one of his hardest verses of 2015 after sounding like the walking dead on What a Time to Be Alive; about two minutes in, you forget the Game’s actually on it, and as for "Mula", Kanye sounds like he could’ve recorded his part in the time it takes to tie a pair of Red Octobers.
The one contemporary superstar who does sound happy to be here is Kendrick, and The Documentary 2 is best when it remembers what the Game is good at: making West Coast gangsta-rap records. Even if it still sounds like he’s learning new flows on the fly, the rapping on a Game album is about as important as the dialogue in a Fast and Furious movie—the funniest parts are wholly unintentional, as are the moments of emotional resonance. You’re here to see a bunch of famous dudes play with expensive toys. This is pretty much the sole purpose for "Standing on Ferraris", which features Diddy and is about exactly what it promises.
Once more, the Game is in the right place at the right time—it’s a good year to make a West Coast, pop-gangsta rap record. Dr. Dre gave this his blessing, so we don’t get the Game spending the requisite 50% of The Documentary 2 or so explaining Doc’s absence. And the usual dream team (Jahlil Beats, Mike WiLL Made It, Boi-1da, will.i.am, Hit-Boy, DJ fucking Premier) recreates the lush, filmic production that defined To Pimp a Butterfly, My Krazy Life, and Compton—mid-song beat switches, segues, and well-placed samples make The Documentary 2 sound like a record that was conceptualized in advance rather than the usual "failed singles + Lil Wayne features" conglomeration.
But since The Documentary 2 is longer than most actual documentaries (to say nothing of the upcoming bonus LP The Documentary 2.5), the Game is given room to try on any number of identities: overcompensating Blood nostalgist (he would immediately correct this sentence to "overbompensating"), wounded alpha male emo-rapper, well-meaning but extremely awkward "socially conscious Game". What doesn’t pop up is *Doctor's Advocate-*style lone wolf Game; 50 Cent went bankrupt this year and when he gets mentioned, instead of going for the kill shot, the Game sorta wishes G-Unit could get the band back together.
It’s just as well that the Game shows as much love as possible—The Documentary 2 solidifies him a grade-grubbing student of hip-hop, one with far more resources and drive than natural talent, but a student all the same. This year, we’ve seen Dirty Sprite 2 and Fetty Wap both top Billboard with a singular sound, street singles, and hands-off A&R’ing—these records are both namedropped here. But like The Documentary, the sequel is a highly enjoyable tribute to old-school, cash-flush, crowd-pleasing, too-big-to-fail hip-hop album making, which can actually sound novel in 2015. The biggest lie he keeps telling is that any album he makes is definitely going to be his last. Can’t leave rap alone—the Game needs it.


Radiohead's latest album is their shortest to date, offering eight new tracks that feel like small but natural evolutions of previously explored directions.

The King of Limbs

Now that the music on In Rainbows has had four years to outshine its launch mechanism, it's easy to forget that the album originally came bundled with an honest attempt to solve a business problem. The pay-what you-think-is-fair system wasn't just Radiohead being magnanimous, it was using their popularity and their newly won independence to ask what might have been the single most important question facing a shaken music industry: What is an album in the download era actually worth to fans?
Announced on Monday of last week and then chucked out to rabid fans like flank steak a day ahead of schedule, the band's eighth album dispenses with the honesty-box pricing model but still finds them using their influence to interrogate the terms around how we consume and relate to music. Containing a slight eight tracks across 37 minutes, The King of Limbs is Radiohead's first album to clock in under the 40-minute mark, falling into that limbo between a modern full-length and an EP. What's more, it feels like it stops short intentionally, almost confrontationally, as if Radiohead are trying to ask a new kind of question about their music.
"None of us want to get into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again," Thom Yorke told The Believer in August 2009. "It's just become a real drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we've all said that we can't possibly dive into that again. It'll kill us." This wouldn't be the first time that a member of Radiohead publicly fantasized about disowning the album format, but it might have been the most convincing. How better to unburden themselves of the stress of making more records in the mold of The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, and In Rainbows than by simply changing the terms of their engagement?
Radiohead's eighth record, The King of Limbs, represents a marked attempt to create a considered and cohesive unit of music that nonetheless sits somewhere outside of the spectrum of their previous full-length discography. And that's not to say that it doesn't ripple with the dazzling sonics or scenery that have become the band's stock in trade, but just that, unlike so many of their milestones, there's no abiding sense of a band defying all expectations in order to establish new precedents.
Instead, we get eight songs that feel mostly like small but natural evolutions of previously explored directions. Opener "Bloom" announces Radiohead's return with a scattershot sequence of chewed-up drum loops and peeling horns that dissolve into a rhythmic tangle. "Morning Mr. Magpie" re-casts an old live acoustic ballad in a more anxious light, its once-sunny disposition frozen into an icy glare. With its crumbling guitar shapes and clattering, fizzing percussion work, "Little By Little" sounds dilapidated and rundown. Meanwhile, "Feral" contorts Yorke's voice into a reverb-infused, James Blake-like wriggle that pings around the stereo channel against a mulched up drum pattern that sounds sharper than glass.
In this more rhythmic first half of the album, electronic percussion figures in heavily as usual, but also with heightened emphasis on drummer Phil Selway's uneven time signatures. The previously well-rounded band dynamic, meanwhile, feels like it's been reduced to a miniaturized version of itself. This isn't the band that ripped through "Bodysnatchers"; these guys play with a precise, almost scientific restraint that suits the twitchy anxiety of these songs well.
Things open up on the softer, dreamier second side, as rhythms recede and more traditional song structures take over. "Lotus Flower", the lead single presumably for having a chorus and not being a ballad, finds Yorke delivering a series of slippery hooks in slinky falsetto mode. Album highlights "Codex" and "Give Up the Ghost" follow, the former a narcotized cousin to "Pyramid Song" that features woozily flanged piano chords, long, plaintive horn trills, and Yorke at his most evocative; the latter an acoustic, guitar-led call-and-response that finds him piling falsettos into a gorgeously ramshackle wall of harmony. Last is "Separator", a clear-eyed, mid-tempo closer that mixes 1990s–era Radiohead with a touch of Neil Young-inspired guitar work and ends on a sweet and easy note that's miles away from the complicated clatter it began with. Compared to such a dense first half, there's something satisfying about all the open space in the album's final stretch; before you know it, the record's breezed by. It's a nice packing trick, one that makes the album feel even lighter than its 37 minutes.
So: eight tracks, each of them worth your time, and yet The King of Limbs is still likely to go down as Radiohead's most divisive record. A trawl through message boards and social networks leaves the impression that many disappointed fans are still struggling to make sense of the gap between the greatness of the thing they got and the genius of the thing they thought they might get. It's in that gap, when assessing the album overall, that it's easy to get tangled up. This is well-worn terrain for Radiohead, and while it continues to yield rewarding results, the band's signature game-changing ambition is missed.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Ashanti’s assured blockbuster debut, a lynchpin record for the new era of pop and R&B at the dawn of the century.

Ashanti

By the early 2000s, every rapper, producer, and label with a weekly Billboard subscription had a new formula for a Top 40 hit: Get a rapper and a singer together to make a song for women. Murder, Inc. arguably had the slickest cheat code, pairing the label’s flagship artist Ja Rule’s surly love-laden raps with a sweet R&B voice like Christina Milian or a soulful gospel tone like Lil’ Mo. Around this time, a 19-year-old Ashanti met Murder, Inc.’s excitable co-founder, Irv Gotti, who, back then, didn’t want an upstart singer from suburban Glen Cove, Long Island, on his hardcore rap label. Instead, he enlisted her as an in-house songwriter and guest vocalist. Despite what Gotti told her in their initial meeting—that he wasn’t “an R&B dude”—he kinda was. His breadwinner, Ja, was a cosplaying 2Pac moonlighting as millennial rap’s Keith Sweat. His new secret weapon was an affable former high school track star who softened Ja’s aggressive balladeering.
Ashanti spent her early Murder, Inc. days writing for her life at Crack House Studios in Manhattan’s SoHo, surrounded by dice-rolling men—the little sister among “a den of wolves,” as Gotti described. She was the sweetie in a room full of so-called gangsters. Her voice wasn’t all that soulful or acrobatic. It was featherweight and more coy than cool, never at risk of overshadowing a song’s lead, which made her the perfect companion for rappers aiming to create sticky street anthems.
Millennial pop soon alternated between two distinct sounds: Ja Rule’s freaky outbursts and Ashanti’s gentle coos. She got her big break singing the hook on Big Pun’s posthumous 2001 single, “How We Roll.” From there, it was a full-on blitz. She sang background vocals on Ja’s monster Jennifer Lopez duet “I’m Real,” a summery jam built on a sample from Rick James’ 1978 weed ode “Mary Jane.” She backed Fat Joe’s crowing serenades on “What’s Luv.” Ja Rule plucked Ashanti again for his sophomore album’s second single, “Always on Time.” His semi-mushy, gaslight-ridden version of romance opens with Ashanti’s soft vocals setting up a toxic love story, complementing Ja’s bearish declarations about swinging dick and running on belated Jesus time. The song peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and set Murder Inc.’s low-key young hitmaker up for a smooth transition from utility player to solo star. The charts might’ve belonged to Ja, but he was no Ashanti.
By the time Ashanti’s self-titled debut dropped in April 2002, she was already a household name. The combination of her breakthrough solo single, “Foolish,” hitting No. 1 for 10 weeks, and “What’s Luv” at No. 2 made her the first woman to simultaneously occupy the top two spots on the Billboard Hot 100. The pop landscape was eager for a voice as sleek as Aaliyah’s after her death, and Ashanti thrived in the mid-tempo zone. Sometimes, too mid. Shortly after her debut dropped, over 20,000 people signed an online petition against her winning Soul Train’s Lady of Soul Award, citing her lack of “singing ability and stage presence.” Her vocals weren’t striking enough to blow out stadiums, but with no major rivals in her path and Beyoncé’s solo debut still a year off, Ashanti sat comfortably on her perch as America’s sweetheart.
Contemporary R&B was full of lush spins on the genre—an amalgam of classic soul from the likes of Angie Stone, Alicia Keys, and Raphael Saadiq; the boyish radio-ready charm of artists like Usher and Mario; and forward-thinking singers like Kelis, Amerie, and Truth Hurts. By May 2002, hip-hop and R&B collaborations made up about a fifth of the top 50 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Half of those records featured Ja, Ashanti, or both. It’s not a stretch to say Murder Inc.’s success likely influenced the Recording Academy’s creation of a new Rap/Sung category that year, later renamed Best Melodic Rap—Ja’s Case-assisted single “Living It Up” lost the inaugural award to Eve and Gwen Stefani’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” Jay-Z and R. Kelly’s platinum-selling joint album, Best of Both Worlds, released earlier that year, further crystallized the trend.
Gotti prematurely dubbed Ashanti the Princess of Hip-Hop and R&B, positioning her as a successor to Mary J. Blige. But of course, the princess title was rooted in binary thinking. “Irv was like, ‘This is our princess. She’s not our bitch and ho. She’s our princess,’” Fat Joe recalled in 2003. Though Ashanti herself aspired to blend rhythm and blues with tough hip-hop beats like Blige, the blues part is much more subdued on Ashanti’s debut, which focuses more on surface melodrama and soft, curling melodies than a deep exploration of personal trauma. Her songs touch on darker aspects of relationships while still playing it safe stylistically—not as gorgeously raw and somber as an album like My Life but looking to capture a similar melancholy.
Ashanti’s solo album was released just two months before the premiere of American Idol, the singing competition show that could catapult new talent onto the pop charts. Her origin story would’ve fit right in with the heartwarming packaging of Idol contestants: a suburban Black girl whose father was a singer and whose mother, a former dance teacher, discovered her singing Blige’s “Reminisce” while vacuuming and thought it was a voice on the radio. By age 6, Ashanti was singing in church and local talent shows. At 14, she got her first record deal with Jive in 1994, but when the label tried to steer her toward pop, she rebuffed. She passed up Princeton and Hampton University scholarships to continue chasing her dreams and moved to Atlanta for a second deal with Epic’s subsidiary, Noontime. Label shake-ups again left her shelved and back in New York, where she had the fortuitous meeting with Irv Gotti that landed her at Murder, Inc.
Ashanti saw those formative setbacks as preparation for the boot camp that was Murder, Inc., where Gotti would have his artists battle each other for beats and recognition, like a rap version of ROTC. Whoever wrote the hottest lyrics got to claim the beat. At one point, Ashanti recorded a reference track for Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real” remix, written by Ja. (In an epically petty move, Sony Music’s head, Tommy Mottola, had apparently tasked Gotti with crafting a hit song for J. Lo to keep Mottola’s ex-wife, Mariah Carey, from the No. 1 spot.) Unbeknownst to Ashanti, Gotti kept her background vocals in the song’s final mix, fueling the infamous myth that Lopez had tried to pass Ashanti’s voice off as her own. Ashanti co-wrote another J. Lo record, “Ain’t It Funny (Remix)” and lobbied to keep the song for herself. She could’ve been stuck stunting as a cameo queen while her work helped legitimize J. Lo’s “Jenny from the Block” persona, but those records quietly set the stage for Ashanti’s string of hits.
Still, it wasn’t until Ashanti delivered another chart-topper that Gotti fully committed to signing her to Murder, Inc. Her breakthrough solo single, “Foolish,” was a soap opera without a plot, an engrossing tale of self-destruction about craving the comfort of a bad relationship. Gotti effectively took the HOV lane to the top of the charts, using a loop from producer 7 Aurelius that was originally created for Brandy and featured the same DeBarge sample as the Notorious B.I.G.’s hit “One More Chance.” While this fusion of old and new sounds effortless on “Foolish,” the execution is clunky throughout Ashanti’s debut. Her intro blends snippets of her star collabs into an EPK-like medley with a screwed male voice announcing, “And now, for our featured presentation…”
Despite their sometimes captivating sense of ease and simplicity, the album cuts never quite match the pomp and circumstance of her debut single. “Foolish” bleeds into its counterpart, “Happy,” a sparse, sunlit ode to Ashanti discovering the love she’d been searching for all her teenage life, with airy flutes that sound like she’s kicking her feet up on a swing. On “Leaving (Always On Time Part II),” the sequel to her and Ja’s breakout hit, he reprises his role as the cheating lover attempting reconciliation. “Call” finds Ashanti rephrasing the sentiment a third time: “When you call, I’ll be right there,” a clumsy attempt to squeeze the last bit of juice from a single idea.
Gotti’s blatant attempt to brand Ashanti as Blige’s heir apparent plagues tracks like “Scared” and “Rescue.” The former is a gloomy groove where his voice lurks in the background like a devil on the shoulder while Ashanti debates letting go of a tumultuous relationship. The latter track repurposes the creeping keys from “Leaving” into a gloomy plea for escape. Gotti reappears as a bruised ex in a subsequent skit, leading into the moody breakup record “Over,” which follows all the back-and-forth contemplations from the previous songs to its logical conclusion. On “Baby,” Ashanti drops her voice to a compelling lower register, a yearning tone that cuts through the album’s vague narratives. Gotti shamelessly ripped the exact rhythm and “Mary, Mary, Mary…” melody from Scarface’s 1997 single “Mary Jane,” laced over producers 7 Aurelius and Chink Santana’s keys to create an operatic ballad about being sucked into a love jones. In recalling his own ingenious move in BET’s 2022 Murder Inc. documentary, Gotti says with a smirk: “Not only did we take the beat, I had Ashanti take Scarface’s flow.”
The back-end sequel “Unfoolish” picks at the same scab as “Foolish” but with a dusted-off Biggie verse from “Fucking You Tonight.” The song was meant as a promotional single to assuage listeners. On the album, it’s used as a narrative full-circle moment to show Ashanti’s growth: “Proud to say I will never make the same mistake,” she sings. On the sentimental follow-up, “Dreams,” Ashanti sings, “Dreams are real/All you have to do is just believe.” Such was her style—a little bit cheesy, a little bit sweet.
Of course, a raging bull named 50 Cent soon ran Ja Rule off the charts and the streets, effectively ending the Murder Inc. dynasty. A federal indictment accelerated the label’s collapse. Still, Gotti retained control of Ashanti’s masters up until two years ago when she announced she was re-recording her debut to reclaim ownership of the album and break free from Gotti’s control. Only recently have they both addressed their once-rumored romantic relationship, though Ashanti avoided defining it as such. She told Angie Martinez in 2023, “Manipulation played a heavy part in me and Irv’s situation.” Gotti, meanwhile, came across as a power player who got so emotionally involved with one of his artists that his other signees, Charli Baltimore and Vita, felt neglected on the roster. While Gotti claimed he conceived “Happy” during a post-coital shower, Ashanti later clarified that she wrote the song in a Long Island parking lot.
Gotti’s heavy hand is the main reason Ashanti’s debut feels programmed into oblivion. But despite its predictability, the album has a certain sonic purity that marks a shift in both sound and thinking for the industry at large. The rise of hip-hop and R&B collabs seemed like the natural order of the universe, an inevitable merger of two rapidly commercializing music genres carrying the New Jack Swing era’s momentum. Rappers today who might’ve once needed a soul singer to sweeten their sixteens can belt their own hooks. SZA has credited Ashanti’s minimalist style as a key influence on her own fluid sound. The genres are now cosmically intertwined. But for better and worse, Ashanti’s debut solidified an algorithm that’s since reached a point of singularity.