I found this in my drafts. Must have been a best of the year - 2013, maybe? It's lengthy and features an unfortunate use of the term 'AutoGoon' as if I think I'll get quoted in a Complex article one day. But some of it makes me go: 'that'll do Pig' to my slightly younger self.
LIL DURK – Dis Ain’t What U Want
Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know I’ve been banging on about the auto-goon craze in rap that’s come about since Future blew up. ‘Dis Ain’t What U Want’ is the perfect anthem for this trend because lyrically its all about Durk doing things that many people dislike - while being so emphatically anthemic that it blows away all criticisms at the same time as stoking them.
Its also SONICALLY exemplary, because Durk’s voice is so obviously an extension of Paris Bueller’s beat (and visa versa). Without that squealing G-Funk synth, would Durk’s voice ring so loud? And this is basically what Auto-Goon rap is doing - making the rappers voice part of the beat (treated in the studio, another melodic and textural layer) - on a sonic level. Emotionally, too, 'Dis Ain’t What U Want’ channels the pain/disdain ambiguity of Future - Durk’s auto-tune twisted voice sounding agonised and plaintive, but also robotically detached from the haterz, impassive in the face of the bloodshed and fury that 'terrifies (his) city’. It tops my list of 2013 tracks, though, for less clever reasons - ultimately, its banging as fuck and catchier even than it is banging. One play was IMPOSSIBLE.
FUTURE – Keep On Shinin’ / Whip Game
ACE HOOD feat. FUTURE – Bugatti
Don’t let Drake fool you, or Kanye for that matter, THIS WAS FUTURE’S YEAR. The Freebandgang tape was chock full of bangers, most of them featuring Future, and the two biggest monoliths of wounded robothug cries were 'Keep On Shinin’’ and 'Whip Game’. Together they make an interesting contrast just cos the beat of 'Keep On Shinin’ hits hardest when it drops everything but the bass (over which Future can practically whisper the hook before building it up as the beat gets more and more grandiose) whereas 'Whip Game’ is all about that high, wailing synth, sort of like an air raid siren heralding the imminent explosion of the 808s. Future is the impassive autotune deadened voice at the centre of the storm (contrast with “Sh!t” where he goes absolutely hog-wild ala. Waka), intoning his most catchy hook all year …
APART FROM “Bugatti”, which is another air-raid synth anthem about fast cars, and features Ace Hood going off like Meek Mill inbetween Future’s triumphant cries of “AWHOKARPINNERNUBEWGATTAY!!!” In point of fact, Future’s actual rapping (which is close to just talking at times) is the part of his music I care about least, and therefore Bugatti probably wins out this fictional contest I’ve constructed on the pure yard-of-Relentless strength of Ace Hood’s rapping alone.
GUCCI MANE – Change Of Heart
RICH HOMIE QUAN - Type of Way
YOUNG THUG - Condo Music / Danny Glover
Speaking of Future’s influence, all three of these tunes sounded like Future or took cues from him. In these Auto-Goon tracks, the beat and the rappers are both so synthetically treated that they seem to have melded - (please prevent me from labelling Lil Durk “Chi-Borg”) there is human emotion pumping through these cables and circuits, but it seems to exist at a slight remove from the rappers - as if this style of music is not only enabling rappers to make tunes that are both hardcore and singalongable, but also to make tunes that express pain even when the lyrics are only expressing how much pain there is to be DISPENSED.
For fans of futurism perhaps its time to start taking a long look at Future-ism - because despite autotunes pariah like status in some circles, there is some really interesting stuff going on regarding the intersection between technology and emotion here. Musically, the really interesting thing is how studio treatment of the rappers voice as an instrument opens up experimentation in rapping in the same way lyrical invention and flow variation once did (and still does).
YOUNG SCOOTER feat. GUCCI MANE – Work
MACEO feat. FUTURE, MEXICO RANN & DR PHIL - Take A Charge
No producer in rap and perhaps even in music generally seems to hit quite such an uncanny pitch of emotional indeterminacy as Zaytoven for me. Since getting into Gucci Mane hardcore a few years back, I’ve been consistently amazed and bemused by Zaytoven’s inimitable style - his circling, carousel-like melodies, the blending of the sinister and child-like, threatening aggression and comical irreverence, alien detachment with down-n-dirty grit.
This oddball contradictory music was perfect for Gucci Mane, and fleshed out by his own persona, but remains in Zaytoven’s beats for other artists, even in a club hit as commercially massive as “Versace” (lets not forget that Zaytoven makes BANGERS - weird as they are). Migos’s loop-rapping is a perfect fit for Zaytoven’s circular style - like one of his piano riffs on FForward. They accentuate the mania that usually simmers in Zaytoven’s beats.
Zay’s beats usually lurch along at a slower pace, and he has excelled this year in bolting together stripped-down bass-centred tracks like “Back At It” by Future and Maceo, and “Take A Charge” by those two plus some others. The cream of the Zaytoven crop this year for my money was “Work” by Young Scooter featuring Gooch - totally weird, full of discordant textures, and featuring an unforgettable bridge (“Fuck ya friends be about ya bizness / stand ten toes down and get eet”) and 'hook’ (“and WORK…. WORK”) which stabbed as relentlessly as Zaytoven’s distorted bass blasts. And Gucci’s double-time verse was great (in a year where I ignored his prodigious output for the most part, due to laziness and the feeling I have that he’ll never be as good as he used to be now).
MEEK MILL – Lil Nigga Snupe
Often Meek’s style grates on me cos of how unerringly angry it is - as if he would be yelling ferociously even if he was rapping about playing a round of golf on a Sunday afternoon with Sir Ian McKellan or something. And, coupled with the pitch of his voice, it can be a little bit too much after a couple of verses. “Lil Nigga Snupe”, however, was clearly fired by Meek’s anger and distress at the murder of his friend (“They killed my nigga Snupe! They killed my little nigga Snupe! And all he wanted was a Coupe! All he wanted was a Coupe!”), one murder out of many (“and in my city all I hear is murder”), and his defiance in the face of the odds that are stacked against young black men in America, his determination to yell his way into that luxury car, that big house, that spotlight, and out of the gutter. The beat broods like a gathering storm in the background and Meek unleashes a stream of top-notch rapping that is just as passionate as it is technically accomplished, and is - given the tragedy framing and firing the track - a primal scream of a rap that’s almost existentially LOUD.
PUSHA T – Suicide / Numbers On The Board / Nosetalgia
Pusha’s album fell flat for me, for whatever reason. I find it hard to warm to Pusha’s rap-style precisely because its so deliberately cold. His citing of The Wire’s charisma-vacuum Marlo Stansfield in the title of his album was entirely apt - because Pusha, though he has a lot to say (and says it well), wears a perpetual scowl which only dropped on “M.N.I.M.N.” when he flat-out impersonated Ma$e on “Let Me Love You”. Now, Pusha’s style is as recognisable as Ma$e’s and obviously does things for a lot of people, but for me the album was boring, seriously lacking in something, perhaps in a sense of FUN?
Then again, maybe it was the production after all, since there were three tracks on “M.N.I.M.N.” that have stayed in constant rotation since I deleted the majority of the album off my IPOD. “Suicide” is apparently not everybody’s cup of tea but I like my tea made by the Neptunes, especially Pharrell channelling the weirdo minimal neck-crack music of the “Hell Hath No Fury” era on what was simultaneously his most comfortingly familiar and jaw-droppingly out-there beats of the year. Pusha’s dour rapping sounded, as it always did on Neptunes beats, almost comically stern - and therefore worked. “Numbers on the Board” is just THAT undeniable anthem, that Raging Bull moment of black-and-white brutality (although the weird skipping beat provided by Kanye and 88 Keys must be noted - and do I even need to say how good the beat is?). Finally “Nosetalgia” saw Pusha IMO outshining the flamboyant brilliance of Kendrick Lamar by sticking to his usual no-frills, precise imagery over a beat so completely stripped back (a couple of distorted guitar chords, looped) that it fitted Pusha like a gun-smoke wreathed ski-mask.
KING LOUIE – Again / Band Nation
KANYE WEST – I Am A God / Bound 2
CHANCE THE RAPPER – Acid Rain
EARL feat. VINCE STAPLES, CASEY VEGGIES - Hive
STARLITO + DON TRIP - Ceasar And Brutus
TROY AVE - Divas And Dimes
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