I just won Find DJ Khaled!
[Video]
[5.00]
Katherine St Asaph: Tap out, phone in.
[4]
Brad Shoup: I saw the title and thought Birdman was finally wishing us adieu. Maybe you’re sick of us breaking these posse cuts down, so we’ll take it by gender. (Maybe you’re tired of people saying “pussy”; feel free to keep scrolling with my apologies.) The dudes aren’t putting that pussy on a pedestal, they’re putting it in a subreddit. By invoking the pussy melodically and repeatedly, Minaj elevates matters to a baseline of interest. Lex Luger’s coterie does its part with the right kind of ponderous synthbeds, pushing your greyfolds until you find this the right kind of bummer.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: Future and Nicki Minaj shine (check the latter’s Birdman-hand-rub line, which would only be better if it weren’t on a song featuring Birdman); as usual, Birdman and Mack Maine are there but not really doing anything special; Lil Wayne opens with the line “if you hatin’, you just need some pussy” and it’s downhill from there.
[5]
Alex Ostroff: So is Rich Gang basically a more self-serious sounding version of that Young Money album? “Every Girl” was frequently eyeroll-worthy, but somehow endearingly so, while “Tapout” is utterly lacking in self-awareness — with the possible exception of Nicki. Even coated in post-40 production and Future, the entire affair somehow sounds significantly less lush than “BedRock” — again, with the possible exception of Nicki.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Minaj, who I thought impossible to like again, provides the smartest verse here. Thinking about sexual capital and economic capital as twin goals of political liberation isn’t a new idea, or an idea without problems, but she provides a feminist rejoinder to the rest of the actors here. Holding her own includes spitting her flow amidst lines like Wayne’s “hit it when I wake up, tell the pigs I say as-salamu alaykum,” or Birdman’s anonymous list of luxury goods, or Future’s ooohs. Minaj positions her soft/cultural power as a kind of feminist usurping of, or perhaps rejoinder to, Wayne’s phallocentric fronting. All of the politics aside, I like how it moves from singing to rapping, I like some of the production, and near the end, when it kind of sounds like Daft Punk doing Tron, it has some chance at being musically interesting.
[7]
David Lee: What baffles me is the production: a rolling prairie storm of triumph primed for “Started From the Bottom” chest beating. It’s so great and so out of sync with the mailed in performances that have been cobbled together into a sex rap Frankenstein. More maddening, though, is the colossal waste of an “International Players Anthem” reference. Shame on Weezy.
[5]
Josh Langhoff: Their Graceland will include a Pussy Room (all my Freudians and Fuddians say “Womb”): enveloping and cushioned, soundtracked by Brian Eno or maybe John Maus if things start getting sexy, and from which no one need ever emerge.
[5]