Rapid Fire Reviews: Catching Up On Hip Hop

With the thousands of swarming fans both new and old that are devoted to every note of hip hop online I've given up ever being strikingly ahead of the curve. While I can maintain a pretty cutting edge demeanor in most genres I've just committed to playing from behind when it comes to rap. So here are a few popular releases from the last few weeks that I wanted to at least get some thoughts out on. 

I Never Liked You - Future

While I've never been the biggest Future fan in the world and I'm nowhere near as positive towards his music as his most diehard followers there is something innovative about his style of rapping and singing as well as his production choices. Even though he's still operating under the same trap bubble that he helped inflate in the first place he is also capable of making subtle stylistic changes that take the sound in new directions. The unfortunate thing is that I much more often enjoy what artists who are inspired by Future do than Future himself. While DS2 and Hndrxx are certainly in the upper echelon of trap records it's been a while since I really liked something Future dropped. So going into this record I wasn't really sure what to expect. I thought the album cover was a hilarious dose of self-awareness from Future and seemed to indicate to me a record much more dependent on Future being in his feelings, that is not the case. While there are some typical R&B ballad type tracks in the mix overall this is the most active and hard-hitting project Future has dropped in years.  That doesn't really fix some of the consistent issues I have with Future's music but it makes everything much more tolerable. The beat choices here are consistently pretty good and while nobody is reinventing the wheel they manage to be appropriately reserved on some tracks but with the ability to kick it all off with one banger after another throughout. I don't think anybody expected Future to randomly improve his lyrical game or suddenly get more vocal range but the production and energy on the record help mask some of those moments where his shortcomings would otherwise be much more centrally on display. Ultimately that makes this just a solid trap record with a mixed bag of features but a pretty solid collection of beats and a flow that makes it a much more enjoyable listen than many of Future's previous full length projects. 6/10

Come Home The Kids Miss You - Jack Harlow

This one is going to take much more out of me as a cultural observer as it will a music critic. Up until a few weeks ago Jack Harlow was a charming hip hop upstart who turned a breakout in in What's Poppin into multiple years of notable public prescence. The peak of Jack Harlow fever arguably came when he delivered a standout feature on Lil Nas X's Industry Baby, one of the best hit songs of last year. Nobody thought he was the next great story teller or hip hop innovator but as a pop rapper he got by with slick flows and a difficult to define ability to summon charisma at the right moments. All of that was true, until this record dropped. Seemingly overnight and in reaction to this album public opinion on Jack Harlow shifted DRASTICALLY as this thing has been shelled by critics and fans alike since it first dropped. So is this thing a toxic disaster for the ages? The next The Big Day? The next Speedin Bullet 2 Heaven? No, not even close. The record isn't great but it doesn't sink anywhere near those legendary disasters and thanks to a particularly bad record from Gunna earlier this year, Come Home isn't even the worst pop rap album I've heard in the first half of 2022. All of that is to quell the massive overreaction people have had to this record since its release, but not in any way a defense of it because this thing is just plain flabby. The one thing I liked about the single First Class was the clever interpolation of Fergie's Glamorous which was handled with another layer of integration than your average hip hop sample. It's a real shame because the rest of the hooks here are a really rough bunch. Given that these songs are still purely pop rap they badly need those sticky hooks and so few of them actually deliver. The more confusing shift is that Jack Harlow has seemingly lost so much of his charisma overnight. Some of his goofier and more fumbling lyrics in the past were covered up for by his clearly harmless demeanor and once again, oceans of charm. That isn't the case here. For some reason he has way more trouble selling those dumb lyrics on this record and it reveals just how drastic his lyrical shortcomings are. This record isn't as horrible as the reputation it developed pretty quickly. It's more forgettable than terrible and I think time will prove that true. When the record is bad it isn't garish or horrifying it's just eyerolling. The generally inoffensive demeanor is also what makes it more generally tolerable as the piano heavy beats are easy to digest and if you can ignore the lyrics there are at least coherent flows throughout. So no I don't think this is Supermarket meets whatever the most recent Nav album is in terms of rap disasters. It's just bland. 4/10

Simple - IDK

Even though I've never been crazy about IDK I can't stop following his career because I continue to see the potential. That's why it really got my attention when he decided to make a record with wall to wall production from Kaytranada. It also didn't really bother me that this was a pretty scant project with just 8 songs that run under 20 minutes collectively. Turns out the inclusion of Kay really does help, even though he limits himself to beats that don't really develop across these short tracks they still sound really good and none of the tracks are long enough to get old. IDK also mostly avoids one of the hallmarks of his music thus far, trying really hard to sound like Kanye. Beyond that I can't really say that I think this is amazing or anything but it's definitely the best thing I've heard from IDK so far. His thematic focus has always been keen and on this record he hones it even further crafting a handful of songs that work alongside the interludes to paint pretty compelling stories. Even if it may not be the most noticeable or biggest hip hop release I think that in a composed way, it's something worth celebrating. 6.5/10