From Megan, a Detroit rapper with the perfect reaction to our varied scores…
[Video][Website]
[5.78]
David Sheffieck: ZelooperZ is one of the most exciting young artists out there, a confluence of the mainstreaming experimentation of Young Thug et al. and the confrontational outsider-music of someone like Scott Walker. He’s more focused on “Plateau” than in earlier releases, but he still sounds like he’s transmitting from an alternate plane. The multiplied voices, the punishingly industrial track, the absurdist humor of the lyric: they form a sound that can be traced to an extent yet still seems completely singular, impossible to imagine until you actually hear it. ZelooperZ may never be the sound of the future — at least not without a few compromises — but he sounds futuristic nonetheless. His voices are calling out in the wilderness, pointing the way for those who are able to follow.
[10]
Patrick St. Michel: So this is the borderline between “unique delivery” and “extremely grating.”
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: Much how mentor Danny Brown pilled himself out into a mentally regressed Juicy J for the “I don’t really like a lot of rap, but…” crowd without half the humor or the craftsmanship, ZelooperZ is a one-dimensional shallow pursuit of doing rapper things. He lists off every cliché, and his rapper’s ego prevents him from ever actually connecting his dorky exaggerated whines to the beat. And for the love of god, he needs to stop with the self-conscious “HEY GUISE I’M RECLAIMING AWFUL STEREOTYPES AND MAKING THEM A PART OF MY IRONIC CHARACTER POSE” because it doesn’t make him any more interesting than the rest of the massive deluge of Z-List blog rap that gets infinite exposure because of their cool friends. Lil’ Silk said “whips like master” on his own “Rapper” not too long ago, sure, but he didn’t make this an obnoxious costume he broke out to pretend he wasn’t a mass of unoriginal and a void where talent could be. Maybe one day ZelooperZ can figure that out and be a promising underground rap icon, but until then he’s just the worst rapper in Bruiser Brigade and evidence that sometimes you’re outside the box because you don’t deserve to be in the box.
[0]
Brad Shoup: As punk as the Golf Wang crew would be if they didn’t fret so much about being rap’s last epoch. ZelooperZ’s careless about meter, half-hearted about jokes, felonious about irony. But what he’s great at is voices: barks, whines, taunts. (Think Son of Bazerk recording nothing but ad-libs.) He’s destroying his own breakout from the foundations, and that’s worth something.
[4]
Sonia Yang: Minimalist yet high octane. Starts and doesn’t stop; even when it does stop the aftershock reverberates in my head. Unfortunately, that mosquito buzz drives me up a wall.
[5]
Alfred Soto: The insistence with which he raps against the beat is almost a talent, but the brain-dead rhymes and imagery aren’t.
[3]
Kat Stevens: The first Depeche Mode song I ever heard was “People Are People,” an instrumental snippet of which was used as the theme to CBBC’s (half-sneering, half-embracing) inventions programme It’ll Never Work. My brain naturally linked this 10 second proto-industrial clanking to the endless parade of Stomp-a-like dudes I’d seen on Blue Peter, clanking together dustbin lids, hitting pipes with other pipes and whooping the end of bright yellow plastic tubes with table tennis bats. This must be what music made in a factory sounded like, made by jerkily-moving Japanese robots. Lurking at the back of the same dusty junk shop full of creaky spinning bicycle wheels and saucepans and radiators is the beat for “Plateau,” but ZelooperZ is not the sort of robot vocalist that obediently does your dishes — in fact he has just smashed his way through the door and squirted ketchup everywhere. Elevation! ALTITUDE!
[7]
Anthony Easton: I don’t know what to do with this — I continue to be intrigued by how it sounds, the abrasive vocals, the dense production, even the speed of it. But the context escapes me, and I don’t want to stand on any landmines. So, I wanted to note my score, and note how valuable I find the Jukebox for pushing me towards things I wouldn’t hear before, which is another gift of Amnesty Week.
[8]
Megan Harrington: It’s immediately jarring to hear such an absence of production. I was raised on abundance, pitch shifting and Autotune and mash ups. But ZelooperZ has little more than a high whistle and a tumbleweed rolling down the boulevard. He’s abrupt, even avant, but this approach never stops him from peeling off a catchy bar. As lean and spare as ZelooperZ sounds he’s equally hilarious and playful in his braggadocio and nonchalance. There’s a space between the overstuffed neon mainstream and the greyscale underground and he lives and breathes in its greenery.
[10]