Review: Kings of the Mischievous South, Vol. 2 by Denzel Curry

July 28, 2024 / Ajey Pandey

I’m a washed-up violinist who grew up on electronic music. I’m not trained at picking up lyrics in a song, which is why I never “got” country music, a genre that typically lives and dies by lyricism.

Hip-hop, however, holds a strange middle ground—the lyrics matter, and rappers live and die by their lyricism. But producers, speaking the language of samples and drum patterns, a language I speak well, disproportionately matter in hip-hop. Jack Antonoff and Max Martin are shadowy figures despite their influence on pop music, but DJ Mustard’s producer tag could—in five seconds—inform the world that Kendrick Lamar sought to “put a rapper on life support” as he did Drake on "Not Like Us.”

Hip-hop’s relationship to lyricism is inherently in tension, most clearly seen in rap bangers. What goes into a song that is simultaneously judged on lyrical authenticity and on suitability for dancing, racing, and fighting? How does one make a song where the lyrics both matter and don’t?

Denzel Curry offers an answer in his 2024 album, Kings of the Mischievous South, Vol. 2. To start, you simplify the lyrics:

Did it all with one flow, [people] used to double-time
Yeah, I used to smart-talk, but now I had to dumb it down

Rap bangers, like any other pop song, need lyrics—or at least a hook—that facilitate singing along. The words don’t need to mean anything (though it helps if they do), but they must be compelling sounds for an untrained music fan to rap along to. This disqualifies the tongue-twisting braggadocio of songs like “Rap God” or “Meat Grinder” and the self-critical complexity of songs like “N95” or “Jesus Walks” —are you really going to stumble through Kendrick Lamar’s double-time exhortation to stop posting your purchases and go outside?

Mischievous South, as an example, has extremely catchy hooks. Some tracks, like “ULTRA SHXT” and “WISHLIST,” have straightforward pop song choruses, but other songs are much simpler. In a live show, the only words the audience needs to know for “HIT THE FLOOR” and “G’Z UP” are the respective titles, repeated as loud as possible in time with the artfully overboosted drums. The verses remain rather straightforward. Curry throws in enough wordplay to suggest he’s a talented rapper—the songs “SKED” and “BLACK FLAG FREESTYLE” have some standout lines—but for the most part he sticks to the requisite lines on smoking weed, selling drugs, killing people, and seducing women.

It’s an act. Curry has been a professional musician since adolescence. He doesn’t have the time to be a gangster, and neither do the listeners bopping along to these tracks. If Denzel Curry was a fraction as antisocial as his persona in this record, he would not have been allowed to do a Tiny Desk concert.

So why are the lyrics authentic? I think it’s because the power fantasy is authentic. Curry did his homework—the sound is on-point for Southern (especially Memphis) hip-hop, the lingo is specific (for example, referring to a 9mm Glock pistol as “Nina”), and the imagery in Mischevious South is no different from, say, a Three 6 Mafia album. The gangster persona is an act, but like Tom Cruise playing a secret agent, Curry is nailing the role.

Denzel Curry likely only shoots guns with the appropriate ear protection. But when the character he plays on this album says he “don’t go to sleep without a Glock by [his] bed,” I believe it. The track sounds authentic, and thus it is.

The proof of Denzel Curry’s authenticity comes from the first feature on the album: Kingpin Skinny Pimp, playing an underground radio DJ spinning up a dirty mixtape. Because hip-hop is fundamentally a Gen X art form, Skinny Pimp was hot stuff in the ‘90s and is now a father in his 40s. But his 1996 debut album King of Da Playaz Ball provides definitive proof that Denzel Curry is paying homage to his elders.

The lyrical content of Playaz Ball is the exact same as Mischevious South, except with more slow jams and with sloppier wordplay. It’s not a fair comparison—even if Denzel Curry didn’t have a track record of consistent quality, the state of the art of rap lyricism has progressed since the ‘90s. But the song structure is the same—“Nobody Crosses Me” has a refrain that A$AP Rocky could lift for himself, and songs like “Y’all Ain’t No Killaz” and “Let’s Start a Riot” roll with infantile hooks to their benefit. I couldn’t play this album in polite company, but it’s fun in limited doses.

However, I’m spoiled on production. I listen to “Lookin’ For Da Chewin’” and I know it’s a 2024 remaster away from fitting into a BEST PHONK DRIFT MUSIC 2024 | ФОНК МИКС complication. “I Don’t Lov’em” is even closer, with a compressed-to-pieces hook that’s a dead ringer for a LXST CXNTURY beat and a sawtooth bass that reaches for an effect that would now call for a deep-fried 808. Even more than the oft-cited DJ Spanish Fly, King of Da Playaz Ball shows the lineage from Memphis clubs to Russian drift complications and Soundcloud rap demos. I’ve heard this combination of dirty, danceable beats and lyrics that exist as compelling sounds. But in modern renditions, the beats are dirtier, and the lyrics are nothing but compelling sounds.

Take the pejoratively-named genre of mumble rap, exemplified by Migos’s Culture II. Even more so than in King of Da Playaz Ball, the lyrics are entirely subservient to the beat. The mumbling serves a purpose: multi-syllabic rhymes make compelling sounds for listeners not following the lyrics. As an example, consider the chopped-up vocal samples on a Skrillex track. However, clean and consistent multisyllabic rhymes require a lyrical skill beyond mortal pens. For rappers who aren’t MF Doom, mumbling allows them to stretch their phonemes into otherwise-jarring slant rhymes. Migos augment the mumbling affect with lyrical ideas that don’t last more than two lines and a brazen willingness to rhyme a word with the same word. The resulting flows are one step away from Simlish (the ad-libs might as well be), but it results in a smooth listening experience atop consistently polished beats.

This makes Culture II a solid two-hour workout playlist with a few standout hooks. The cost is that no song nor singular Migo is distinct. One of them specifically insists they make real rap and not mumble rap, but I don’t know which song or Migo that line is from.

This anonymity shows why lyrics do matter to a rap banger—it’s the feature that differentiates one track from another. I woke up one morning with the hook of Denzel Curry’s “ULTRA SHXT” stuck in my head. If I applied for a Form-1619 Provisional N-Word Permit (I don’t plan to), I could rattle off the chorus to “WISHLIST” from memory. By contrast, I think the hook to Migos tracks like “White Sand” would be more memorable if, say, Ronald Jenkees transposed the vocals into a particularly expressive keyboard jam.

But that opens another line of inquiry—if a rap banger principally needs the lyrics to be compelling sounds to dance, race, or fight to…do those compelling sounds even need to be lyrics?

Flume’s discography suggests this is possible. Most of his albums are so chock-full of featured vocalists that the results are alt-pop albums with a rotating cast of singers and rappers, but his mixtape Hi This is Flume shows what is possible when he doesn’t call a set list in advance.

Tracks like “Ecdysis” and “Vitality” still follow a rap-banger structure and drum pattern, but the vocalists have been replaced by synthesizer patterns. Instead of lyrics, Flume twists melodies, timbres, samples, and layered audio effects into compelling sounds atop drums more nuanced than anything on a Migos record. Dropping the commitment to intelligible lyrics allows Flume to experiment more with sound design—“MUD” in particular shakes the soundscape with a quivering synth lead that sounds like it holds air in stasis. Few rappers could pull off a flow that could replicate the rhythms in "MUD”, nor could they compete with the glass-shattering drums on the track.

I’m a washed-up musician who grew up on electronic music. I’m spoiled by sound design luminaries from KOAN Sound to The M Machine to Noisia to SOPHIE. Kings of the Mischievous South, Vol. 2 is a lovingly modern take on the ‘90s dirty south rap banger. But if I want to dance, race, or fight, I want more compelling sounds than anything a human can offer.

I’m sorry—I’d rather play Moody Good’s “MTGFYT.” We can fight to it, if you’re so inclined.

0 Likes

Review: Class by Paul Fussell

July 25, 2024 / Ajey Pandey

There are three key pitfalls to reading Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.

Readers fail to realize that, like George Carlin, Fussell is both joking and not joking.
Readers assume that the culturally-accepted status symbols of 1983 hold true today.
Paul Fussell assumes he and his cohort are rebelling against the American class system instead of replacing its status markers.

Fussell does the Steven Covey thing in which the core concept is about 15% of the book and the rest is examples to solidify the idea. The examples have started to slough into anachronism, so in 2024 they offer a fun window into what the 80s were like for day-to-day people. Remember that in 1983, the Baby Boomers were between 23 and 40, the Silent Generation were between 41 and 58, and the G.I. Generation were between 59 and 82. Fussell himself was in the G.I. Generation, having deployed in France in the last year of the European Theater, but he’s a self-described iconoclast in a rather conformist generation. We’ll get to generations.

The useful core of the book is a taxonomy of American classes and their motivations. Fussell splits the country into nine classes:

Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper-middle
Middle
High proletarian
Mid proletarian
Low proletarian
Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight

Note that class has little to do with money. Mark Zuckerberg is upper-middle-class because he attended Phillips Exeter but did not inherit his billions. Taylor Swift is middle-class because she comes from nowhere and remains obsessed with status. Donald Trump is high proletarian because he spends his money like someone who’s never had money in his life.

Instead, class is a function of taste, esteem, and power—none of which can be bought.

Keep in mind that status games are inevitable—insofar as humans are social animals, we conceive of ourselves in the context of others. We by necessity show other people how we fit in and distinguish ourselves through status signals—even refusing to play the game is simply another strategy.

W. David Marx describes a variety of status signals in his book Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. The most obvious status signal is conspicuous consumption: luxury goods, ostentatious fashion, flagrant waste. It’s fast, it’s straightforward, and it imparts your high-status glow on even the dimmest bulbs in town.

But if the money lasts for generations, subtler strategies emerge. Flaunt worn-out heirlooms to show the longevity of your wealth. Wear plain clothing to mock the nouveau riche and evade the pitchforks. And even flout the rules of status, demonstrating that you’re so high-status that it doesn’t matter how you dress or act.

However, even these “stealth wealth” status symbols can be emulated by people with more education than wealth. Even if you don’t have old money, you can show off education and “good taste” by replicating the old money look with a helping of artsy flair.

But for people with neither literal nor cultural capital, Marx describes simpler and cheaper status signals in reach of everyone. You can indulge in kitsch—artifacts with the airs of high art without the price or complexity of high art—or in “flash”—artifacts with the airs of conspicuous consumption at a discount.

Different classes reach for different status signals. Arguably, the status signals you and your community reach for define your class position.

The top three classes are defined by inheritance—of property, of capital, of breeding and finishing. They act like they have nothing to prove, and compete over who cares least about status competition. The highest-status people in the United States are so high-status you don’t see them. Their surname may be recognizable, but they’re elsewhere. Staff manage their businesses, their homes, and their capital. These are the billionaires you don’t hear about. What you think is the top of the status ladder is simply the upper class you see. Failsons, owners of seventeen McDonald’s franchises, and influencers with unclear incomes.

The “elites” of America are really the upper-middle class. They’re the professional class, the creative class, the people who make money so they can work harder so they can make more money. This is the class that urban Americans aspire to, because they nail the American ideals of technical expertise, cosmopolitanism, and working for your money. In the early ‘80s, at the tail end of an American Awakening, these elites would be doctors, lawyers, and professors, spending impossible sums on suits that looked like nothing. In the mid ‘20s, as we approach the apotheosis of an American Crisis, these elites have become doctors, tech workers, and financial analysts, buying shockingly expensive grey T-shirts. One could keep 80% of the script of American Psycho while swapping New York for San Francisco, the suits for Patagonia Cotopaxi vests, and 1987 for 2024.

It’s the middle class that has changed the most since Fussell wrote this book forty years ago. They’re still motivated by pervasive status panic, but the “high-status” ideal they’re chasing has changed from the echoes of a late ‘50s High to the echoes of a late ‘90s Unraveling. In Fussell’s day, they clung to large corporations, terrified of losing their jobs. They lived in suburban developments, obsessed with living life correctly and fitting in. The women treasured friendliness, and the men sought anything they could call “executive.” People advertising their own lives in exchange for a crumb of status.

In the mid 2020s, the middle class scramble from gig to gig, terrified of falling behind in their careers. They’re moving into city centers with jobs and lattes, obsessed with optimizing their lives and networking well. The women treasure having the correct politics, and both men and women seek anything they can call “creative.” People posting about their own lives in exchange for a crumb of engagement.

Again, class has little to do with money. Even the most broke barista is middle class insofar as they dream of becoming an artist.

In 2008, software engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin posted an “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” a fourteen-part manifesto that could have been much shorter. In it, he provides a compelling model of ideological drift in the West, noting that Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, and the Democratic National Committee moved in ideological lockstep, while establishment conservatives consistently trailed one nostalgia cycle behind.

Less scrupulous talking heads call this the “Deep State,” but Yarvin was marginally smarter—he noted that no conspiracy was necessary to make the West increasingly progressive over time. Instead, the ideological lockstep came from the fact that academics, journalists, pop artists, and technocrats attend the same schools, read the same books, hang out in the same places, and believe in the same gospel of humanist, Whiggish progress.

Yarvin calls this phenomenon the Cathedral: a spiral in which educated liberals converge on ideas that justify having more educated liberals. His prescription is to “retire” all government employees (R.A.G.E.), install a “king,” and induce an institutional reset that the country hasn’t seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There will still be elites, but they should not be in the Cathedral.

Geopolitical analyst George Friedman might refer to this Cathedral as technocracy: the institutional model that was built under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win The War. As described in his book The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, the idea behind technocracy was that staffing a government based on documented expertise (as opposed to ideology) would enable the state capacity necessary to win an industrial war. It worked on both the Nazis and the Soviets. The problem is that “only an expert can deal with the problem” became an ideology unto itself, with its adherent experts already in the position to justify, fund, and empower yet more experts. Friedman expects the late ’20s will force an FDR-scale reset of the American government’s role and staff. There will still be elites, but they might not be technocrats.

The proletarian classes operate on a slightly separate class ladder than the upper four classes. Today, we’d consider the split between upper and middle classes versus the proletarian classes as “white collar versus blue collar” or “urban versus rural.” I’d split the difference based on whether one went to college. Again, class has little to do with money—one can make a lot of money without having (or wanting) a lick of culture. Fussell describes the proletarian experience as bondage “to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast foods, consumer schlock.”

High Proles are the class that rural Americans aspire to, because they nail the American ideals of entrepreneurial gumption, straightforwardness, and working for your money. These are the people who buy trucks that cost more than BMWs and spend literally thousands of dollars on guns. Many of them afford this “being their own bosses”—plumbers, machinists, traveling nursing aides. By contrast, Fussell categorizes people with less autonomy at work—linemen, cops, cosmetologists—as middle proles, and people with inconsistent and/or seasonal work as low proles. The distinction between different levels of proletarian isn’t clear to me because I’m not in that milieu. (Fussell speaks little of the destitute and bottom out-of-sight classes. Class is still somewhat about money, and Fussell didn’t have any wry jokes to make about the desperately poor.)

Crucially, rural proletarians are the people who voted for Trump, got consumed by QAnon, and post minion memes on Facebook. At their most secure, they scoff at the overeducated babbling of hoity-toity liberals. At their least secure, they seethe over the power and influence of distant coastal elites who parade their obvious yet inscrutable superiority over “real” Americans. A clique—that’s who runs things. Not them. Not yet.

On 15 July 2024, Sean O’Brien, General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in America, spoke on the Republic National Convention primetime slot, offering to parley with Republican politicians in an archetypal Wide Boston Man’s accent. He told the crowd that his mere presence on stage offended both the left and the right, but that he didn’t care. He still had his Commercial Driver’s License. Should he be ousted as a union leader, he would still be a teamster—he’s still more comfortable in a big rig than in his baggy suit and lopsided tie.

From an economic standpoint, the Democrats are still the party of proletarians—spend more on the poor, support unions, raise taxes on the rich. But class isn’t about money. In matters of culture, of taste, of caste, the Democratic Party is the upper-middle class. It uses ten-dollar words, assumes a cosmopolitan sensibility, and recoils at crudeness of all kinds. For Kamala Harris (or rather, her staff), it makes sense to embody the ironic kitsch-turned-art sensibilities of Charli XCX’s brat. But to a straightforward Morgan Wallen fan, the strobing beat of “Everything is romantic” is disorienting and ugly.

The redistributive, natalist, and protectionist populism outlined by Lyndon LaRouche and F. William Engdahl, popularized by Donald Trump, coalesced by think tanks like American Compass, and embodied by Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance is more adapted to the economic and social mores of the American working class than the Democratic Party platform. Marx, like so many modern economists, mistakenly assumed that workers were motivated by entirely material needs. Instead, American workers are just as much motivated by small-town cultural conservatism and a reflexive distaste of yuppies trying to correct their tastes in alcohol, diesel, and bawdy jokes. Trump didn’t appeal to this demographic only because of “economic anxiety.” He was like them.

Marx can’t explain Trump. Fussell can.

The worst-aging chapter of Fussell’s book is the last, describing himself and people like him within a category “X”—expatriates from the American class system, dressing down everywhere, seeking self-directed employment and growth, and engaging with “good” and “bad” taste with ironic remove. In his day, at the turning point between an outgoing Awakening and an incoming Unraveling, at the zenith of the G.I. Generation’s cultural influence, Fussell’s X cohort was countercultural. The “Xs” in 1983, specifically if they were older that 20, were the only people driving to a posh dinner in a deliberately ratty Saab, wearing an out-of-fashion suit with ratty tennis shoes, deriding the venue as a K-mart rendition of van der Rohe, and leaving early.

But in 2024, on the other side of the American saeculum, Fussell’s account of category X reads like Generation X.

William Strauss and Neil Howe’s generational theory, as described in books like The Fourth Turning is Here, is woo-woo for a sociological model, but its underlying mechanism is children making an equal and opposite reaction to their parents while forgetting the lessons of their grandparents. In 1983, the idealistic individualism and spiritualism of the Baby Boomers was still a youth movement maturing into the yuppie phenomenon and megachurch boom. The culture of adults was defined by the idealistic collectivism of the G.I. Generation and the grey-wool-suit pragmatism of the Silent Generation. The core of American culture was still extremely conformist. Not everyone went along with it—Paul Fussell was contemporary with writers like Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs—but as Fussell himself notes in Class, the dissenters were few.

In 2024, everyone dresses down. Every upscale city has nice delicatessens, liquor stores with niche brands, and restaurants with health-conscious fusion foods. The middle-class ideal strives to the creative-class self-direction of Fussell’s X cohort, albeit with less of the intelligence and chutzpah required to actually counter cultural norms.

Strauss and Howe show the path from there to here—in the early ‘80s, Paul Fussell and his Beat-era contemporaries were the cool uncles and aunts for a disillusioned “latchkey” generation. These kids saw their little snippet of the class hierarchy, found it lacking despite all the hype, and found that Uncle Paul with his down vest and Coltrane records agreed. These latchkey kids found that the dissonant music, ratty clothes, and well-placed coarseness of their X forebears hit the exact note of cynical counterculture that offended their elders and filled a gaping hole in American culture. And thus the cultural vocabulary of Gen X became the model of counterculture.

But if Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Beavis and Butthead, and Banksy are now the things parents like, how do the youth of 2024 rebel?

The “countercultural” move now is to wear a suit to work, to have kids early, to go to Latin mass, to reject individualism in the name of blood-and-spirit cohesion. This is the dissident right, the reactionary feminists, and the alt-right before them. Ben Shapiro is right to call conservatism the “new punk rock.” Whereas the social progressivism of the left has waned from ‘80s counterculture to ‘00s mainstreaming to an exhausted ‘20s establishment party line, the right has found that—paradoxically—reaching for midcentury respectability freaks their elders out and fills a gaping hole in American culture.

Paul Fussell died in 2012, right as the American saeculum tipped into crisis. He didn’t see the insights of his funny little book get inverted. No matter—the core structure holds just fine.

0 Likes

Review: Snow Angel by Renee Rapp

July 20, 2024 / Ajey Pandey

This review is about an okay album by an okay pop musician, but it’s really an attempt to understand how women think about love.

Men underrate the value of listening to music made for women. We often claim that women make no sense, but the underlying thoughts and feelings behind seemingly erratic behavior are spelled out in singer-songwriter music written by young women for young women. Take Reneé Rapp’s “Talk Too Much” as an example:

I’m taking everything I see as a sign
I know it’s crazy—but what if it’s right?
I’m here again! Talking myself out of
My own happiness
I’ll make it up ‘till I quit
I wonder if
We should just sit here in silence ’cause
I think I talk too much

If your ex broke up with you out of nowhere for bizarre reasons, here’s an explanation, flanked by early-aughts girl-rock guitars.

I recognize that Rapp’s songs are not strictly autobiographical—she wrote a song called “Gemini Moon” despite being a Pisces Moon—but singer-songwriters make their money by writing relatable music. Note that Rapp’s debut album Snow Angel breaks zero new ground. The core subject matter is perennial angst, the lyricism is unremarkably competent, and the production is mostly Breakaway-era Kelly Clarkson with 2020s studio tech and a chamber orchestra for flair. The art itself is not what made this album debut at #44 on the Billboard 200.

No, the reason that Reneé Rapp is selling $35 T shirts, $40 tote bags, and $75 hoodies is that her music speaks to young, educated, and urbane women. The specific fictions of songs like “I Hate Boston” underpin emotional truths that a listener can relate to if she has felt that way before. And that emotional truth is accessible on Spotify to any man who wants to know why women are Like That.

In 2016, evolutionary psychologist David Buss wrote an essay outlining a “mating crisis among educated women.” His core argument is:

Women typically seek out men who are their age and older and are at their level of education, intelligence, and achievement or higher. This replicates across a wide range of cultures, suggesting a biological underpinning.
In North America and Europe, women are getting educated at higher rates than men.
Men, however, are typically less concerned about their partners’ current education levels and care relatively more about youth and physical attractiveness. This also likely has biological underpinning.
Thus, for educated women, there is a relative lack of “eligible” men—and they’re competing both with other educated women and with less-educated women.

For most people, this works out fine. Most late-twenties Americans are in committed relationships. But in this situation, there remain more single women than men they want. If you’re one of these women, you have a choice of bad options:

Fight harder for male attention—do things you’d rather not to convert a hookup into a relationship.
Hold out for an ever-shrinking pool of men who are educated, emotionally mature, sufficiently masculine, and still single.
Fight both evolved psychology and common sense to date a man who’s lesser than you in most ways that matter.
Stop looking for a man in your life.

Lonely men are too steeped in their own resentment to realize that they have the easier problem. Yes, elevating a rock-bottom, lonesome life into something that invites women’s attention is a Herculean task. But sifting through a deluge of male attention in search of someone who won’t hit-and-run is Sisyphean by contrast.

The self-insert protagonist of Snow Angel never gets a happy ending. The men in these stories are often commitment-averse losers, from the broke-but-still-smoking ex of “Tummy Hurts” to the happy-birthday-are-you-alone texts of “23”. And even at their best, the relationships remain painful. “Swim” talks of waterboarding and lambs led to slaughter, and “The Wedding Song” talks of a longed-for marriage that he wasn’t interested in.

And yet, the men still get picked—if not by the narrator, then by some other woman. Resentful redpillers love wishing a lonesome middle age on the women who reject them, but rejected women have to grasp for weaker, sadder revenges. The only hope for the man in "Tummy Hurts” is that “Eventually, 2043 / Someone’s gonna hurt their little girl like their daddy hurt me.”

The sadness in Snow Angel is notable in its persistence. Note that Taylor Swift—artistic standard-bearer for all young women, not just the urban and educated—still has joy on her album Midnights. Swift depicts a liberated singlehood in “Bejeweled” and a genuinely good man (at the time) in “Lavender Haze.” Even the panic works out better—Swift’s “Mastermind” suggests the same depth of neurotic rumination as Rapp’s “Talk Too Much,” but in Swift’s case it works to secure the boy.

But Reneé Rapp isn’t writing for all women—she’s writing for the educated, the urban, the still-feminist, the maybe-bisexual. And those women don’t get happy endings on Snow Angel, even on the deluxe edition.

The Charli XCX album brat consumed the consciousness of chronically online girlies all over the internet. Musically, it’s a tour de force of offbeat girl pop, from the swaggering “360” to the self-explanatory anthem “Mean girls.” To the fandom, it shares celebrity gossip-as-lore in songs like “Sympathy is a knife” (not confirmed to be about Taylor Swift) and “Girl, so confusing” (confirmed in a remix to be about Lorde). But to me, I’m most enthralled by the penultimate track “I think about it all the time,” the track where Charli asks whether she’d want to disrupt her career to have a child.

Somewhere between 2022 and 2023, the dam started to break on what Katherine Dee called sex negativity —a slow trickle of thirtysomething women lamenting “missing their window” for children, “cottagecore” content glorifying a pastoral motherhood, and the rise of a “soft girl” or “divine feminine” genre of longing.

The sequential shocks of Trump’s election, COVID-19, and the aging of millennials into their thirties drove nails into the coffin of the Tina Fey, Michelle Obama, Bustle and Refinery29 era of post-Recession “girlboss” feminism. As the women who leveraged girlbossing into a fulfilling life stopped posting, younger Gen Z women witnessed the leftovers—the most neurotic, the most radfem, the ones least joking about the box wine—as they lamented how all their feminism got them nothing. The contemporary discourse still resembles the GamerGate wars of social justice warriors versus incel gamers, but an exhaustion has set in. Online politics has hit a sugar crash, scored by folklore-era Taylor Swift and to a lesser extent Snow Angel, in part because drawing political lines based on gender contravenes the human desire to fall in love.

The men who won’t date liberals and the women who won’t date conservatives will find each other eventually. Their respective politics are smoldering into a weary suspicion of institutions and a resignation that the world will end anyway. That’s enough common ground for opposites to attract.

Renee Rapp does not continue misery-posting with her next project: playing Regina George in Mean Girls (2024), the movie musical based on the stage musical based on the movie based on the…guide for parents on intrasexual competition between teenage girls. Between her performance in the movie, her interviews during the promotion tour, and her tie-in song with Megan Thee Stallion, Rapp plays up the archetype of the horny and unhinged It Girl, to the delight of her fans.

The self-insert of Snow Angel, much like Regina George, is ultimately a character—relatable, but by no means a whole person. There’s value in asking why people find a piece of artwork not just compelling but relatable, but no one is a monolith, and no one stays the same. In the year it took me to write this review, Rapp came out as lesbian, exempting herself from much of the anguish of her own album. Maybe her next project will follow Zolita’s Evil Angel into a heart-of-darkness account of dysfunctional lesbian romances. Or maybe she’ll fizzle, settle down, and make a career writing Broadway songs.

I didn’t like the album—it was well-done, but it felt forgettable. Oliver Tree also did anguish scored to mid-aughts nostalgia with Ugly is Beautiful, but his rendition felt more impactful, in part because it was paired with truly bizarre music videos and interviews. Maybe if I shared in the mimetic thirst of Renee Rapp interview compilation videos, I’d have a different opinion of her music.

As it stands, I’m more interested in the listeners of Snow Angel than the album itself.

0 Likes

Review: Rappa Ternt Santa by T-Pain (Written in 2022)

July 06, 2024 / Ajey Pandey

A review I wrote in 2022. It’s about T-Pain but it’s really about music production.

The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer was a commercial failure because it was a bad drum machine.

Before hip-hop had been invented by Black teenagers in the 70s, drum machines were made for non-professional musicians (often organists) as an alternative to finding a drummer for events—this is why many of these devices had presets for styles of ballroom dance. Roland Corporation introduced the TR-808 in 1980 as a professional variant of this tool, offering a full simulated drum kit with programmable drum patterns so that musicians could record demo tapes without hiring drummers.

But instead of using sampled drum recordings—deemed too expensive—Roland used analog synthesis to generate every drum sound.

It was a mistake.

The drums on the TR-808 lack the aural artifacts of things hitting other things. A real kick drum has presence in the middle frequently range from a mallet hitting a drum. A real snare rattles for some time after the drumstick hits the head. A real hi-hat has the warbling ring of a metal dish vibrating, and it has enough mid-range frequencies to fight with a vocalist.

The TR-808 sounds too pure. It’s sparse and tight in a way no actual drum set is, and that means it fades into the background. This is fine if you’re a songwriter recording a sparse sketch before your producer gets in the studio, but pop and dance music depend on the drums. To make the TR-808 audible in, say, a song, you need to either boost the drum volumes to absurd levels (and add reverb to counteract the artificial tightness) or else take out almost everything else in the track, hollowing out your mix to make room for your delicate TR-808.

If you want to hear the kick, you can’t have a rich bass line, because any bass guitar is more impactful than the sine-wave kicks of the TR-808. If you want the snare to pop, you need your guitars and synths to tiptoe around the middle frequencies—and this is the 80’s! Producers wanted to blast the listener with loud guitars, louder singers, and louder snares!

So if you wanted your song to move without a solid bass line or a lively mid-range, you needed the tinny hi-hats of the TR-808 to run wild in the high frequencies where they can’t bother anything else. If you tried to make a rap track like that, you would sound like the Beastie Boys.

After only five years, Roland gave up on synthesized drum sounds. The TR-707 and TR-727 rely on the sampled drum recordings that Roland cheaped out on for the TR-808.

By the time Faheem Najm released his December 2005 debut Rappa Ternt Sanga, he had been a rapper for five-ish years with a group called Nappy Headz, making anonymous Deep South hip-hop. It wasn’t working—Tallahassee Pain knew he needed to change his sound. But he was also an insecure 21-year-old, which is why he starts his debut album with an oddly defensive intro track justifying his decision to start singing. It’s a sloppy start—but it leads into the lead single “I’m Sprung,” which is the real start to the album.

T-Pain made two key innovations when he presumably borrowed a dusty TR-808 for his first solo album. First, he fixed the TR-808’s bass problem. Normally, a song can’t have a TR-808 kick and a bass line at the same time. But, if the producer jacks up the decay on that synthesized kick, records the oddly melodic boom into a sample, and runs that sample through a keyboard, they suddenly have a kick pattern and a bass line—with one sound! Add the rest of the TR-808 drums as-is and sprinkle in a sparse chord progression, and you have a musically interesting R&B beat.

But the backing to “I’m Sprung” is rather cold, which motivates T-Pain’s second innovation: Auto-Tuned harmonies. Auto-Tune, first released in 1996 by Antares Audio Technologies, is a digital pitch correction tool that pulls apart a digital vocal recording sample by sample, measures the approximate note of each sample, and replaces that sample with a copy that exactly matches the measured note. Used as intended, the result is a vocal performance more perfect than a perfect take. T-Pain ignored the manual and twisted the parameters into a digital vocoder, blanketing his songs in lush harmonies that do not fight with the TR-808’s snares and claps.

T-Pain leans further into the 808s and Auto-Tune harmonies with his next album, Epiphany, and Kanye West further polishes the sound (with T-Pain’s help) in the iconic 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak. But in 2005, the sound palette sounds like a raw precursor to what would become Ariana Grande’s pop masterpieces thank u, next and Positions.

No one actually uses the TR-808 anymore—the 808s of today are constructed out of modern digital tools, often from scratch. As a high school music producer, I made a few 808s myself.

The modern 808 kick is often a two-piece sound: the impact is typically a sample of a kick drum or a punchy low-frequency bloop; and the decay is a synth bass (I went for flat square waves) with a short attack and release, a long delay, and a low-level sustain. The impact and decay are triggered together, but very often producers will change the bass note by pitch-bending the decay sound instead of re-triggering the kick. That way, the producer can write a bass line that’s more complex than the kick drum pattern while retaining the booming bass effect of the TR-808 kick.

The impact and delay pieces are glued together with matching (or complementary) post-processing—kick up the gain until the sounds crackle from overloaded audio channels, then layer on a low-pass filter, chopping off the high-pitched distortion and leaving a low-frequency rumble. The result is a singular sound: the deep-fried 808 kick. For an example, witness Dylan Brady’s 2015 album All I Ever Wanted. (Four years later, Brady would become one-half of the hyperpop duo 100 gecs.)

T-Pain’s 808 kick in Rappa Ternt Sanga is already impossible on the TR-808, which couldn’t adjust the kick’s TONE parameter on a per-note basis, but ensuing decades have completely transformed what an 808 drum is.

The modern 808 drum kit features warm kicks with semi-synchronized bass sounds; crunchy snares, cross-sticks, and claps; skittering hi-hats, rides, and cymbals; and melodic tom and cowbell fills. Like the original TR-808, modern 808s typically lack the artifacts of things hitting other things. Instead, they often gain texture from digital clipping, as overboosted signals get crushed by maximum and minimum integer values in digital audio channels. The distortion litters squared-off noise across the frequency range, which can then be shaped by digital frequency filters, giving presence to the kicks and heft to middle- and higher-frequency drums.

Roland now sells a TR-808 sample pack as a digital audio plug-in, but Bauuer’s 2012 “Harlem Shake” was probably the last pop hit using the original TR-808. Since then, 808s have become warm and punchy, with variation from producer to producer, and song to song.

T-Pain’s artistic reputation turned with his October 2014 performance for the NPR Tiny Desk series. His sparse three-song performance shocked listeners who weren’t expecting The Auto-Tune Guy to show up with clear plastic glasses, a practiced croon, and the fidgety demeanor of a shy kid who learned how to be social in his adulthood.

Nowadays, T-Pain is a known turbo-nerd with a booming Twitch presence, a Confused Jackie Chan tattoo, and an entire album about video games—but he has always been like this. The smooth-talking, womanizing party animal depicted in his songs is a character he plays for laughs.

First, T-Pain got married in 2003 and has stayed married (with kids!) since, which suggests limited experience in a strip club (as a patron, anyway). Second, no 21-year-old releases a professional-quality album without spending their adolescence taking music too seriously to be cool. “Nerdcore rapper” is a tautology.

If the listener drops any expectation of authenticity, Rappa Ternt Sanga becomes a pleasantly goofy album. The premises of songs like “Studio Luv” and “Como Estas” are flatly ridiculous, and T-Pain leans into knowingly dorky phrases like describing sex as “doing that night thing” in "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper).” Even “I’m Sprung” leans into comedy, describing a suave Rapper Man cooking and washing dishes for a woman who “ain’t even [his] main lady.”

It’s a dumb fun album—but it would have been better as a ten-song, forty-minute affair with no features outside of Taino’s verse in “Como Estas.”

There’s another history to the TR-808 in hip-hop—a darker sound that emerged from underground clubs in Memphis, Tennessee. For the Memphis scene, the icy artificiality of the stock TR-808 was perfect for a grimy, lo-fi approach to ‘80s and ‘90s shock rap. DJ Spanish Fly pioneered the sound, using both the TR-808 kick and the TR-808 cowbell for melodic effect.

The result is transfixing—the crunchy 808s, the cowbell melodies, the moody samples, and the pitched-shifted vocals add up to what in 2022 would be called “phonk”—a subgenre of hip-hop beatmaking associated with SoundCloud weeaboos, Russian music nerds, and drifting cars.

And it was happening in Memphis clubs more that 30 years earlier.

T-Pain probably didn’t listen to DJ Spanish Fly, and even Memphis icons like Gangsta Pat and Three 6 Mafia didn’t cling to the naked artificiality of 808s. But phonk as it exists today, as hyper-compressed screenshots of Memphis in pre-war Russian-language memes, follows the same playbook of textured 808s, of adding warmth through digital clipping and filtering.

It’s parallel evolution, the consequences of two different music scenes—one poppy, one edgy—trying to breathe life into a quirky ‘80s drum set, crashing together in the glorious cacophony of mid-2010s SoundCloud.

Did Dylan Brady learn his crunchy 808s from Tallahassee or from Memphis?

By 2015, would it have made a difference?

I think the 808 is as impactful for 21st-century pop music as the electric guitar was for the back half of the 20th century. The bold-face artificiality of the 808, the willingness to throw out any semblance of things hitting other things in favor of tastier aural texture, is key to the sound of pop in the Internet era.

And for that reason, I’d argue Rappa Ternt Sanga is one of the most important albums of the 21st century.

Yes, 808s and Heartbreak is a skip-no-songs masterwork. The pop songs of 2022 owe their sound to what Apple Music liner notes describe as Kanye West’s “going electric” moment. But 808s and Heartbreak owes its sound to a chubby gamer boy from Tallahassee.

Without T-Pain, the 808 would remain a niche tool for underground rappers in the American South.

We wouldn’t have Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.a.a.d. city, or Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

We wouldn’t have Lil Peep’s Come Over When You’re Sober, or BTS’s LOVE YOURSELF 承 'HER', or Charli XCX’s Charli.

We wouldn’t have Flume’s Skin, or Cashmere Cat’s Mirror Maru, or SOPHIE’s Product.

We wouldn’t have the production work of DJ Mustard or Dylan Brady.

And we wouldn’t have Ariana Grande, an artist who refined Faheem Najm’s combo of chill 808s and lush harmonies into two of the most polished musical works in human history.

In 2013, Usher pulled T-Pain aside on a plane trip to tell him that T-Pain’s work had “fucked up music.” It sent T-Pain into a depressive spiral for four years, in part because the opinion of his friend Usher was rather common. Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreak was controversial at its release, in part because of stylistic choices that T-Pain taught to Kanye. In 2009, Jay-Z had released a scathing track called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” telling purportedly effeminate musicians to “get back to rap, you T-Pain-ing too much.” In 2010, TIME Magazine called Auto-Tune one of the worst inventions of all time.

The controversy must have weighed on T-Pain, despite the constant caveats that he was one of the good Auto-Tune users. Remember, he leads the album in which he pioneered the 808s-and-Auto-Tune sound with a stammering plea for listeners to understand why this rapper turned singer.

Sales success doesn’t wash away insecurity that deep.

It took another ten years for the truth to reveal itself: T-Pain didn’t ruin music—he re-invented it by popularizing the lush 808 sound that has since spread and mutated into a panoply of soundscapes.

We owe pop music to T-Pain.

0 Likes

Review: Four Cover Songs by Dorian Electra (Written in 2022)

July 06, 2024 / Ajey Pandey

This review was written sometime in 2022. It’s about some goofy cover songs by an alt-pop musician, but it’s really about what I consider the most important artwork of the 20th century.

The late 1910s in Europe must have felt apocalyptic. Colonialist expansion had reached a fever pitch of extraction and atrocity. Rapid industrialization had choked every city in smog, crushing workers under market economies unless a workplace accident got them first. New technologies from radios to wristwatches to automatic rifles to airplanes were evolving at a blinding pace. A geopolitical Gordian knot had escalated a terrorist attack into a Great War so inhumanly bloody that the optimistic opinion was that it would scare everyone out of war forever. And as that war ended, a global plague kept the death toll running.

The War to End All Wars killed forty million. The following influenza pandemic killed another twenty-five to fifty million. The world was getting faster, more complicated, and more divided. The “progress” promised by the last few decades had wounded the world, and it was only getting worse.

Imagine being in your late twenties during the war. You’re from a family of art lovers—your grandmother’s paintings decorated your home, and three of your siblings are now artists. You’re a painter yourself, drawing influence from Cubists and Post-Impressionists. You even made a splash with a painting that was weird even by the standards of other avant-garde freaks.

And then war breaks out. Your friends and your brothers are sent to the trenches, but you get a health exemption—the privilege of watching the world end at a distance.

And you’re still in the art world, putting up with smug fiftysomethings with strong opinions about what is “good art,” getting mad at you for making “ugly” paintings. And you keep thinking of the bureaucrats, robber barons, and military officers sending young men like you into meat grinders, chatting over hors d'oeuvres about those lazy kids with their bad art and Communist books.

Maybe you think it would help if someone took a muddy Lebel rifle into one of these posh events and started firing—but you’re an artist. You can do better than that.

Between April and July 2021, indie pop artist Dorian Electra released four cover songs with accompanying videos on their personal YouTube channel: “The Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran, “Positions” by Ariana Grande, “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” by Tame Impala, and “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.

Each cover tears ragged holes into the original songs, with mumbled vocal performances run through screeching Autotune, overcooked drum tracks, distracting sound effects, and abrupt digressions in the backing tracks. The videos are similarly surreal—Dorian’s outfits are garish and uncanny, and the videos are layered in strange visual effects that keep time with the music. Every cover ends with the production falling apart in a dense cacophony of noise.

These covers are not listenable in a traditional sense—but they’re not supposed to be.

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp is a Dada masterwork because new generations of reactionaries keep discovering this piece and getting mad at it for the exact same reasons—and it manages this feat because it is actively ugly.

Some art pieces require context to make an impact, like Félix González-Torres’s heartbreakingly beautiful Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Some art pieces are vanguards for a new aesthetic paradigm, like Kanye West’s controversial-at-the-time 808s and Heartbreak. By contrast, there is no way an overturned urinal with a pseudonym scrawled on the rim can be beautiful.

And crucially, only a skilled artist could have made something like Fountain at the time. It was submitted to an organization of which Duchamp was on the board. He burned bridges with this piece.

A bad artist would have submitted a boring artwork. It would have been forgotten.

A child would have submitted an earnest attempt at high art. It would have been endearing at worst and promising at best.

Duchamp, by contrast, knew what would scandalize art snobs the most, and he did exactly that.

To be clear, Dorian Electra is a skilled pop musician. Their debut album Flamboyant was at once slickly produced, funny, eminently danceable, and boldly political. In these four cover songs, they deliberately and intentionally break pop music rules, most significantly the need for clear lyrics and well-differentiated instrumentation.

Even the crunchy hyperpop of 100 gecs is fundamentally polished. Underneath the pitched-up Autotune, the duo sing clearly enough that listeners can hear the lyrics; and the music itself is professionally mixed so that the drums don’t overpower the lyrics and the lyrics don’t overpower the chords.

Dorian does the opposite—they mumble the lyrics, sing too close to their microphone, and attempt ludicrous falsettos only kept in place by Autotune. The mixing is also intentionally bad—sometimes the drums are too loud, sometimes the bass is too heavy to carry a melody, and in the last section of the “Shape of You” cover, the backing track is abruptly made far too quiet for the vocal track. These aren’t rookie mistakes, because even a beginner wouldn’t add glass-breaking sound effects that drown out the singer.

In fact, most of the off-putting elements of these covers reflect Dorian’s real experience in music, fashion, and video direction. In the “Shape of You” cover, they wear knockoff Air Jordans with an Amazon logo replacing the Nike swoosh. The choreography in the “Positions” cover juxtaposes Evangelical Christian imagery with the open sexuality of the original song, resulting in an uncanny performance that ends with humping a Bible. The video for “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” uses the exaggerated fisheye perspective of ‘90s music videos, but it also displays a can of Bang energy drink in the corner, referencing “sponcon” (sponsored content) TikToks that would keep a can of the drink in frame as casual product placement. The video for the “Happy” cover, made in collaboration with 645AR, is shot in an alley, mirroring the opening alley shot of Pharrell’s original music video.

These songs are not the work of a bad musician—there are too many moving parts, too many instruments, too many obviously botched sound effects.

It took work to make songs this ugly.

By modern standards, Fountain is the ultimate Dril post. It angers everyone Duchamp wanted to anger, and it’s deeply hilarious to everyone else. But it’s a vindictive work. It barged into the art world screaming, “The way things were always done made things worse, and they deserve to burn.” Duchamp couldn’t destroy capitalism, or colonialism, or the military industrial complex, but he could break art with a vandalized urinal—it was the only weapon he had.

A century after Fountain, the world is once again getting faster, more complicated, and more divided. The “progress” promised by the last few decades has wounded the world, and many young people fear it will only get worse.

And we’re all stuck online, putting up with smug fiftysomethings with strong opinions about what is “good art,” getting mad on social media about how pop culture sucks now. And we keep seeing the bureaucrats, robber barons, and government leaders sending young folks like us into meat grinders, moaning in op-eds about those lazy kids with their bad art and Communist streamers.

Is it any wonder that the memes have been deep-fried, that the pop has gone hyper, that the Zoomer-dominated internet has embraced the “shitpost?” If you can’t destroy capitalism, or colonialism, or climate change, then you can at least break the internet—it’s the only weapon many young folks think they have.

Dada is back, because if the rules gave us this, then they deserve to burn.

0 Likes

Review: DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar (Written in 2022)

July 06, 2024 / Ajey Pandey

A music review I wrote in 2022. The cadence of this review changes slightly in the context of Lamar’s latest song, “Not Like Us.” The review is more about me than about the album, though.

A few years ago, I built up a small following on Twitter making...let’s say “content.” I would never be recognized in a convention specific to that “content,” much less on the street, but I did make some money off it.

It took a weekend for my following to turn on me.

A few months prior to that weekend, I had an altercation on a private forum with other “content” creator. I expected it to stay private. Instead, the other creator—long after the altercation had resolved—chose to escalate publicly, framing the altercation in the language of gendered abuse.

Within a few days, everyone in the scene chose to exile me. “Content” creators that had once spoken highly of me stopped talking to me. Everyone who had a simmering issue with me spoke up at once. Someone compiled all my sins in a handy thread. A few people posted apologies for ever dealing with me. A handful of people reached out privately to tell me that they thought I was unfairly targeted—but they didn’t speak out publicly, for fear of being next.

Because the internet calls someone who defends an abuser another abuser.

For the next few months, I tried to make more “content,” with two thoughts in my head:

One: I’m burnt out. I can’t trust people. I’m trying to make things, but I keep re-reading the horrible things people said about me, because I know where it all is.

Two:

If I gotta slap a pussy-ass [hater], I’ma make it look sexy
If I gotta go hard on a bitch, I’ma make it look sexy
I pull up, hop out, air out—made it look sexy
They won’t take me out my element
Nah, take me out my element

With the release of his 2015 magnum opus To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth secured a compelling argument for “greatest rapper of all time.” Whereas Lamar’s previous album good kid, m.a.a.d. city retained a cinéma vérité sensibility (despite being incredibly polished in production and lyricism), To Pimp a Butterfly is operatic. Its production is a love letter to Black American music, and the lyrics are Lamar’s thoughts about what it means to be Black in America—all of them. It’s almost eighty minutes long.

Only Kendrick Lamar could make an album like this with any competence. I don’t personally resonate with it, but calling To Pimp a Butterfly a no-skip masterpiece is not controversial.

But there are no bangers. “King Kunta” has swagger, and “Alright” has energy, but “i” is the only truly danceable track on the album, and that’s if you ignore the lyrics.

The response to the single release of “i”, six months before the full album, clearly spooked Lamar, because he did not put the single version of “i” on To Pimp a Butterfly. Instead, he used a live performance that was derailed by a fight in the crowd. Lamar stops the music to address the altercation, shouting “how many [Black men] we done lost bro...this year alone?”

After the back-and-forth, Lamar returns to the performance with an a cappella poem he apparently had in his back pocket.

Kendrick Lamar doesn’t want you to dance—he wants you to listen.

And if his audience is having a fistfight during a song about embracing love in a grim world, they’re not listening.

Kendrick: Hello ma’am, can I be of any assistance? Seems to me that you have lost something. I would like to help you find it.
Stranger: “Oh yes. You have lost something.”
Kendrick: “...”
Stranger: “You’ve lost…your life.”

Most discourse on “cancel culture” misunderstands what it is. It’s independent of ideology, and it’s not a culture so much as a side effect of the social internet handing the mantle of celebrity to anyone who wants it.

With social media, the world now has not only celebrities, but also mini-celebrities, micro-celebrities, and nano-celebrities, all with fans and thus the dangers of having fans at all.

One thousand followers is considered a minuscule fan base, but 0.1% of one thousand is one person. Edge-case fans are inevitable. And if someone has a million followers, one-in-a-million freaks are a statistical inevitability.

Thus, once you reach 1,000-2,000 non-bot followers, you will find that one of those followers has, in fact, devoted great swaths of their free time to hating you, specifically. This kind of person is rare, but not special—haters are everywhere on the internet. Your personal hater follows everything you do and archives everything remotely objectionable in a seething rage. Blocking your hater doesn’t work—they’ll make an anonymous “sock puppet” account. Deleting old posts doesn’t work, either—your hater has screenshotted and downloaded everything. Acting perfectly actually makes things worse—text posts are easy to fake, and even the thinnest veneer of perfection makes your hater hate you more.

And you are not perfect. Eventually, you will post a “bad take,” reveal an embarrassing secret, or even fail to be cruel enough to a targeted Bad Person. At any controversy that your regular fans notice, your hater circulates your deemed list of sins through every channel they have. Because social media feeds are designed to exploit the human mind’s sensitivity to threat, your fans find your sins—large or small, real or misleading—on their feeds.

Inevitably, some accusation sticks—even if it only makes sense in bad faith—and you find yourself mired in internet drama. Your life and work are now Discourse, and God forbid a poster stay silent for the Discourse. And, you, internet nano-celebrity, see every morsel of criticism, every person who even slightly agrees with your hater, every post saying that you should go away forever.

To your hater, nothing you do will satisfy them. You can make the most beautiful art, write the most insightful essays, or save thousands of lives, and your hater will craft compelling arguments that you are scum and that your work is bad.

The hater will dig a hole in your lizard brain, reminding you that they are watching you, and that they know that you are watching them back, in a panopticon where everyone is both prison guard and prisoner.

You are “canceled” with the strain breaks you and you log off indefinitely.

Kendrick Lamar has many such haters—some of them are hosts on Fox News. He leads DAMN. with clips of their segments.

This album is for you.

DAMN. only has three songs that bear the dynamism of a rap banger—that is, a song worth dancing, racing, or picking fights to. However, the bangers define the first impressions of the album. Lamar glares at the listener through the album art, beneath bright red all-caps serif. Even the song names are all-caps and punctuated, as if Lamar is barking out the tracklist mere inches from the listener’s face.

You called my last album pretentious? You want the bangers back? Well, here’s an album full of bangers. Witness me.

The songs “DNA.”, “ELEMENT.”, and “HUMBLE.”—the three tracks that got music videos—hit like meteors. Lamar’s performances prioritize momentum and bravado, rapping about his musical skill in a manner that demonstrates his skill, and calling out his haters for being inauthentic, for being weak artists and—crucially—for being disloyal. It would be standard-issue brag rap, except that Lamar occasionally cuts the drums for extended sections and—in two electric moments—strips the beat to just a booming kick, screaming bloody murder for extended verses.

Sike! You get no bangers. Kendrick Lamar doesn’t want you to dance—he wants you to witness.

I’m better than all of you. I could end any of your careers in an instant. And if I leave, the whole scene will be weaker from my absence.

I have always held arrogance in my soul. From elementary school, I got strong grades with little effort. By tenth grade, I was crushing the hardest curriculum my high school could find for me, while openly scrolling through Reddit in class. By college, I was pulling a 3.8 in engineering school with a philosophy minor while building a reputation in the campus activist scene and getting a full night’s sleep every night. I have been called some kind of genius or superstar since I was five.

I try to keep my ability in context—there are smarter people than me, and raw smarts cannot replace work ethic, emotional strength, or basic likability. But as my “content” creation career burned before me, “ELEMENT.” spoke to the self-absorbed bile in my throat:

Most of y’all ain’t real, most of y’all gon’ squeal
Most of y’all just envy, but jealousy get you killed

I knew my “content” was among in the best in the scene. I had elevated the caliber of work and discussion among the scene, and I had done it with honesty about my privileges and my goals. The people who turned on me were weaker artists than me, often relying on clout games to get on my level, often cosplaying as deeply oppressed starving artists when their lives were actually quite comfortable.

They were envious snakes—even the ones that I thought were my friends, the ones who had shared long conversations with me. Losing those “friends,” however, felt like betrayal. On social media, you can have parasocial relationships with people with the same scale of fame as you. If anything, the illusion of friendship is stronger—but they’re only profile pictures in your DMs.

Mutuals aren’t friends. Colleagues aren’t friends. The difference is in loyalty.

The slower songs reveal the true motives of DAMN. They have the stylistic embellishments of pop hits, but they sound too exhausted to keep up the energy. Don’t be fooled by the expert wordplay and lush production—Kendrick Lamar was burnt out for the production of this album.

“YAH.” opens with an announcer screaming “New Kung Fu Kenny!” like he’s opening a bombastic freestyle, but the song itself depicts an overstimulated exhaustion I found familiar in my “content” days. Spend enough time being “terminally online” and your brain will always be buzzing too. “FEEL.” plays a similar move, opening with a beat exuding relaxed swagger before abruptly switching into the uneven plodding of the actual song.

The feelin’ of apocalypse happenin’, but nothin’ is awkward
The feelin’ won’t prosper
The feelin’ is toxic
I feel like I’m boxin’ demons, monsters, false prophets, schemin’ sponsors, industry promises

Throughout the album, Lamar repeats, “Ain’t nobody praying for me,” and “What happens on Earth, stays on Earth.” Both refrains have a double meaning as a threat and a cry of pain. On one hand, if no one is loyal to you, if you believe that your actions on Earth will not follow you to the Kingdom of Heaven, if there are no consequences, why not choose violence? Why not shred every hater and naysayer with your impossible talent? It’s not like anyone can stop you.

On the other hand, if no one celebrates your success, if nothing you do will bring salvation, if there are no consequences, why do anything at all?

I felt that nihilism. Why make “content” at all?

So I stopped.

I logged off.

I let myself be cancelled.

It took five years, two children, and a pandemic for Kendrick Lamar Duckworth to produce another album, and he approaches Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers as a changing man. He went to therapy, started untangling his traumas and misdeeds, and spent less time on his phone—that’s what he means by “fasting.”

Some of the album can be seen as a sequel to “DAMN.”, especially “N95,” a hype song about getting off social media and having higher standards for the people around you. (You can tell who wasn’t paying attention by the people repeating “THIS SHIT HARD” in the comments.)

But the last song on Mr. Morale is the most important one for knowing what Lamar will do after this album, now that he has no contractual obligations to Top Dawg Entertainment.

Ask me when I’m coming home
Blink twice again, I’m gone
I choose me, I’m sorry

I consider myself an ex-artist now. I still have ideas for “content,” I still write snippets of fiction, and I’ve been working on this music review for a few months, but I’m not publishing any of it. I’ve redirected my focus to my day job, to light advocacy in my city, to being an athlete for the first time in my life. I only write when I feel like it, and those flashes of inspiration have been rare in 2022.

I chose me over my art.

And I’m happier for it.

0 Likes