Perhaps not “all the way,” but #4 on the Hot 100 is pretty close…
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Al Varela: BigXThaPlug making country music is such a no-brainer idea that a song like “All The Way” was inevitable. I would have expected a Morgan Wallen collab first, but getting the Great Value version of him also works. Unfortunately, I feel like the concept of a “BigXThaPlug country song” is all this song has. BigX is a strong rapper on his own, and his hard-hitting, quick-witted flows sound great over the twang of the instrumentation coupled with the brittle trap snares. The copy/paste nature of its chorus loses me. Bailey Zimmerman doesn’t let loose the way he does in his other breakup ballads. It feels a bit stiff, a bit too scared to truly let the venom and exhaustion seep through the melody. I do think Wallen would have done this chorus a little more justice. Plus, the abrupt way the verses and chorus switch into each other is too disconnected to flow well together. You can tell they came up with the chorus separately, and BigX ended up mostly freestyling his verses with the general goal of “vent about a breakup.” I know what both of these artists are capable of, and I wish they just did a little more with it.
[6]
Claire Davidson: That BigXThaPlug actually has some credibility fusing country with rap doesn’t make “All The Way” feel any less haphazard: his gruff, deeper timbre doesn’t congeal at all with Bailey Zimmerman’s more nasal drawl. If anything, this song feels like two different fragments stitched together, a matter not helped by the speed of BigX’s flow, which leaves him even more unsupported by the flimsy trap beat and vaguely twangy guitar that powers the track’s verses. I will say that the relationship BigX details in his bars does prevent me from dismissing the song as a throwaway, as he narrates the crushing disappointment of realizing that his partner, who once shared their most intimate secrets with him, now takes his devotion for granted, and may very well be cheating on him (“Sent a text, it turned green, why the fuck it ain’t blue?”). That is surely a very frustrating dynamic, and BigX says his piece on the matter with an almost breathless fervor; I’m particularly fond of the way different vocal takes interrupt each other toward the end of the second verse, as if BigX is voicing his frustration in rounds. Yet any catharsis his level of commitment may have provided is stifled by the song’s lack of a climax that would’ve been provided by, say, the inclusion of a bridge, to say nothing of the underpowered snarl that dominates Zimmerman’s hook.
[5]
Jel Bugle: I thought it was going to be another one of those sad nu-country songs, well yer man is doing the sad country chorus, but I enjoyed the rapping, that was good! It’s quite simplistic.
[6]
Taylor Alatorre: BigXthaPlug’s burgeoning career is proof of the newly coined wisdom that “you can just do things.” Turns out that in the era of rage and plugg and who knows what else, you can just put out a bunch of straightforward two-minute rags-to-riches bangers, backed by a syrupy Southern drawl and a set of outrageously obvious sample flips from the disco and post-disco eras, and people will love it. You can even title your album Take Care like you’re the Replacements doing Let It Be, and no one will notice this because they’re too busy anticipating the next “ay!” drop. The Dallas rapper’s decision to Go Country is as predictable as his go-to rhythmic patterns, and yet “predictable” need not always be a pejorative. A better word here might be “systematic,” and there’s a base-level pleasure in listening to BigX cleanly hit every target according to his self-designed fundamentals. “All the Way” follows the template too religiously to mask its naked crossover intentions — the lyrics give us the broken-hearted troubadour, but the staid verse-chorus routine has him domesticated. Still, the basic formula holds up even when country-fried, and BigX’s voice retains its rare ability to command every square inch of your mental space.
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Mark Sinker: Mid-tier extracts from r/AITA: whiny bois blow it up
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Ian Mathers: Damn, white boy jump scare right out of the gate here. The guitar lick loop is a lot more effective than Zimmerman’s hook, but he’s not bad here; both he and BigXthaPlug are kind of let down by how generic the take on heartbreak is, but I could imagine the melody getting stuck in my head.
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: Was looking through producer Bandplay’s Apple Music producer playlist and stumbled upon a rapper called Upchurch who worked with a rock band called Dixielanders to make Creeker III, all of which are part of a discography that has songs called “Bonnies in the Coupe,” features with Boosie Badazz, Project Pat and of course everyone’s favorite donut. Anyway,I guess doing records like taught Bandplay how to build a home for both BigX and Bailey.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This is so stupid. “All The Way” is the most basic possible implementation of the concept of rap-country fusion, a rudimentary lost-love country hook appended to bog-standard breakup-rap verses. There’s no musical synergy between the two, no attempt to weave together their styles or attitudes beyond simple juxtaposition. Perhaps that’s what is most interesting about this — while prior iterations of this formula emphasized the fish out of water qualities of one or the other participants, here the cohabitation is completely normal. This could be any anonymous collaboration between two artists in the same field — Zimmerman could be Polo G, BigX could be ERNEST — and it still would work to whatever extent it does. It’s a complete blunt force instrument of a song, and unfortunately I am susceptible to those!
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