On “Elevate,” he uses a simple end rhyme, like he does on many tracks, but quickens his delivery of lines at the top of the bar so it sounds more complex (“When I was pumping gas on road trips to go from Cincinnati on to Dayton/ I couldn’t gauge it I wanna thank God for working way harder than Satan”). It’s not awful or devoid of skill, just lackluster and predictable.
Not defending Drake but it just seemed funny to me that the writer is assuming this professorial tone ('lacklustre and predictable' oh how dreary) while missing a clear rhyme that the least educated listener can hear easily.
The beat feels expansive and expressive, like Zaytoven is playing from the heart with Future following where he leads. And though its hook, typed out, reads as a flex—“What I’m supposed to do when these racks blue?”—it feels more like a sigh when Future sings it, or a corrective to Howlin’ Wolf’s definition of the blues as brokeness opening the door for evil. What Howlin’ Wolf didn’t account for is how that door never really shuts.
Literalists might say the tape glamorized drug abuse as a coping mechanism, but that would suggest any of it felt remotely glamorous. Mostly, it seemed, Future just wanted to forget who he was; nothing felt as good as feeling nothing at all.
As he’s evolved, Keef’s detached from that behind-the-beat pocket and shifted to a more aggressive style—one freed from the rhythmic grid other artists treat as a requisite constraint, without being untethered from it altogether, a la certain Lil B releases. This unpredictability lends a chaotic tension to the music.
He’s unafraid to use space, preferring the compositional effect of short burst phrases, rather than long, familiar cadences. (E–40’s new single "Choices (Yup)" is an example of a more traditional rapper working in this style.) Like King Louie, he will lock into a particular pattern for several lines, using extreme slant rhymes ("I just hit a stain, finagle/ I just hit a stain, finito"), as if trying to demolish the distance between words themselves, or to camouflage his thoughts. He’s made rhyming a word with itself into an art form of its own—he likes to complete the circuit early, or to let words stay static while the meaning shifts ("Nigga don’t slip, you lose it, then you lose it").
Creative industries have been torn apart by the “attention economy”. The logic of clickbait seeps into literature (sad box-ticking tropologies), music (time series analysis: “x must happen 15 seconds into the track”), television (modulating content in response to viewership)The effect of statistical work on the userbase of these platforms being fed back into dark UX patterns is a teleological snare: it recursively primes cue reactivity for the behaviour analysed. The endgame is to diminish prefrontal inhibitory control of users, increase compulsion.That reward processing is sensitised in this way means only the most extreme content is selected for: aggressivity, histrionics, peacocking in all its forms. Everything becomes a performance. This is comorbid with the general tendency of modern behavioural marketing to encourage self-reinforcing lifestyle addictions. The telos of catallaxy as a distributed information processing system is to integrate the dopaminergic circuit and reduce individual agency.
'Totally, I think that enthusiasm comes through. That’s why it’s such a bummer that music writing has shifted in such a way that no one can be passionate about as many things as they need to write about to make a living.
The most positive reaction I can have to music journalism now is like "yeah, that’s good. They didn’t fuck it up." That enthusiasm is gone, in the sense that somebody really needs to tell you about something, they’re excited and they want to share it. That’s what always drew me to music writing, but it has nothing to do with what you see on these websites. It’s somebody who probably agreed to review a record before they even heard it, then had to file it by 9am the next day so they could start working on the next thing.
That was a huge fear for me, a situation where I had to project this totally false magnitude of interest in Mac Miller so that I could eat.
I got really spoiled because my contract with XXL was just "file two things a week, as long or short as you want." I asked if there was any other direction, but that was it. That’s really how you learn to write, too. I wish that could be my job. That was the Gawker model, too, and I think that’s the reason that the only people doing good journalism now are Gawker graduates.
You have to care to write, it’s not like fucking building treehouses. You can’t just phone it in. We’re at a time where the value of writing is in question, but the entire business model of these companies is to churn out this writing that objectively has no purpose. Don’t you want to make a case for this? There’s so many smart people, and then they’d get a job at Complex and get fucking trapped summarizing a Drake Instagram post or something. Or maybe they love Drake Instagram posts. But you’re absolutely doing it right.'
Re: Pitchfork journalism, here's a good interview with Noz
http://www.lebronjames.co/interviews/andrew-nosnitsky
this is where i am as a rap fan lol:I think that a lot of it’s a function of getting older, but it’s also a function of how music’s consumed, and who’s controlling these channels. All this fucking new Juggalo shit would’ve gotten no traction twenty years ago. Imagine what Insane Clown Posse’s streaming numbers would’ve looked like in 1997. And would The Source just be like "oh, we gotta put Twiztid on the cover." You can acknowledge, like, this is some shit for gutter white kids in Iowa. It is rap music, it has its values, but we don’t have to make it the center of the conversation.
Hip-hop on the whole is in a really bad place spiritually right now. Obviously it’s always been very much a genre for capitalism, but the way people engage it now… I always use the example of Grand Puba wearing Tommy Hilfiger, where the whole thing was that black kids weren’t supposed to wear Tommy Hilfiger and so he was like "fuck that, I’m going head-to-toe Tommy Hilfiger." Or like the Lo-Life stuff, where they decided they were just gonna jack all the Polo. They literally would just go into the shop and walk out with a rack of Polo. It was capitalist, but antagonistically so. But now, if hip-hop engages with fashion, it’s like "I wanna sit next to Anna Wintour." It should be like "fuck Anna Wintour!"
And also, I’m old. So much of what I’m saying is colored by the lens of I’m a thirty-five-year-old man right now. Sometimes I wonder why I even have opinions about, like, the new Travis Scott record right now. It’s almost embarrassing to care. Like I think about when I was fifteen, and if some dude who was thirty-five was like "I don’t like Outkast" I’d be like "fuck you dawg, how do you even know who Outkast is?" I don’t think anybody over thirty even knew any of the music I listened to. Maybe the senior editor at The Source or something.