Checking in on what’s up and down in rap…
[Video]
[5.56]
OUT: Rapping about Twitter/X.
FIVE MINUTES AGO: Straight rappers comparing themselves to lesbians.
[7]
Tim de Reuse: He’s not at his most interesting; though the sound design makes a couple bold statements, flashing its bright sirens and blades whirring through the air, it all comes off as a comfort-zone kind of venture. “Lesbian” vs. “Spiderman,” though – that belongs in the last-rhyme-of-a-verse hall of fame.
[6]
Ian Mathers: I’m not an expert and can’t tell if this video is AI, but I can tell it looks like shit in several ways. A real shame, both after the “Tailor Swif” video and because the song itself is pretty decent.
[6]
Alfred Soto: For a while I clocked Rakim Mayers as a hungry brain reeling from exposure to David Crosby at a crucial point in his aesthetic development, and he still loves his Nixon-era Funkadelic funny voices. “Helicopter” is a straightforward manifesto, rapped straightforwardly. As weird as it is to hear an A$AP Rocky track without vocal gewgaws it’s not unpleasant.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: On this site we have commonly disdained the rockist leanings of certain kinds of rap. Reasonably so, since mostly racist rock fans trying to apologize for the bitter racial slurs they once hurled at Prince or Muddy Waters will openly praise any rappers who display “rockist” leanings. We in the poptimist cult will then down them ruthlessly for caving to the threatening rest of the past. This I call a cult cuz we are here in 2026 discussing an A$AP Rocky album track. The poptimist tack we took in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s has molted into a cult of nostalgia propping up hacks like Addison Rae and mediocre wannabes like Yeat/Che/whoever comes next, maybe? The reactionary tack towards nostalgia sadly is not a thing restricted to fascists – leftists are just as willing to capitulate to it, lest they fall to infighting or bootlicking. People who cannot see a future will cling to the past, with the chilling news about our future requiring us to drag the wealthy and greedy and cowardly from their perches and halt the fanatical desperation to live forever in computer servers once the promise of heaven has evaporated for anyone who has a vaccine or committed an act they will take to their grave before admitting lest they be flayed alive. Life unfortunately has other plans, one of them smugly disdaining the foolish, selfish arrogance of their elders then either bitterly acceding their own faults but refusing to be responsible for fixing them, the other angrily decrying anyone deflating the egos or cults of their elders then leading to their dismantling as they are faced with the brutal truth and quietly slipping into their freest and most honest selves. But the future will come for us anyway, so now we must ask again: why the fuck are we still cosigning Houston appropriation by New Yorkers? Tell these old men; NO.
[0]
Taylor Alatorre: The central refrain of Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up” was always a fourth-grader’s idea of unbridled masculinity, which is why it became such a hit, along with its built-in geographic flexibility. Rocky’s too typically nonchalant here to summon that vision of anarchic rebellion except in a dimly reflected form. He defers to the default flow implied by the industrial-trap backdrop, rather than grabbing onto its grimy rungs and giving us the cartoonish spectacle that it calls for.
[5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A$AP Rocky has never said a clever thing in his life; his gift instead lies in sounding stylish over expensively grimy beats. Here, he makes himself into just another set of sound effects in the background of his own banger of a beat. You can only hope that he finds a more compelling rapper to finish the track off (Schoolboy Q? TiaCorine? Rico Nasty?) before he puts it out as a single.
[6]
Will Adams: The beat’s gritty texture and growling bass evoke “Move That Dope”, while the t-shirt spinning hook shouts out Petey Pablo. Two great reference points that pull most of the weight on behalf of a serviceable performance from A$AP Rocky. Maybe they should’ve kept that bonkers Carti verse intact.
[6]
Andrew Karpan: The perseverance of A$AP Rocky feels deliberate, diligently and professionally maintained, indicating and signifying nothing. The menacing bass beats on this one echo with the kind of inky blank space that seems to await the nothing ad-libs that Playboi Carti allegedly initially deposited there and then withdrew. Truthfully, they’re probably better unheard, casting endless shadow on the text.
[7]