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