Timely, because it’s only been 100 years since the last 20s, and maybe 70 years since Gwen Stefani.
[Video]
[6.25]
Leah Isobel: Flo Milli fills “Roaring 20s” with her personality more than her rapping, tossing off ad-libs into the spaces between her lines and spending nearly half the song just talking shit over the beat. It gives the track an appealingly louche vibe that works with the sample, but it also lowers the stakes a bit compared to the more structured material she’s released in the past; there’s nothing as rhythmically satisfying as, say, “I feel like a pu-ssy-cat-doll” or “I like cash and my hair to my ass.“It’s goofy and relaxed, but brief, and feels a little like a stopgap.
[6]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A bratty, campy, fiery, two-minute exploration of the startling similarities between the 1920s and 2020s, in which Flo Milli decisively manifests that she is, indeed, a “rich bitch.”
[7]
Aaron Bergstrom: Too long by half, which seems like it should be impossible for a song that barely cracks two minutes. Let’s start with the positive: Flo Milli is electric. She gets two verses, and they’re both [10]s. I have never been more convinced that she’s on the verge of becoming a huge star. Sadly, those verses are also very short (each clocking in at exactly twenty-eight seconds) and they’re both over by the 1:26 mark, which means more than half of the song, and the last third in its entirety, is given over to just riding out on a middling beat built on a sample that wasn’t even fresh back when Dr. Dre trotted it out for Eve and Gwen in 2004.
[6]
Dede Akolo: I do love Kenny Beats’ audacity; sampling “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof in its entirety is to be respected. This is really the inter-cultural exchange that the government could only dream of. Flo Milli bounces along with the phrasing “ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum” without a miss.
[8]
Juana Giaimo: “Roaring 20s” is more like the snippet of a song or the introduction to a bigger project. I’m glad it is because it’s maybe too intense to be longer — the childish “If I was rich man” can only be tolerated a few times. Flo Milli’s charisma and sense of humor is present (I especially enjoyed the irony of the first verse), but when her voice gets muffled towards the end, it doesn’t leave any impression.
[5]
Oliver Maier: Kenny Beats’ instrumental has the sense of a nearly-aborted experiment, salvaged especially for Flo Milli’s sake. I can’t think of many other rappers with the force of personality required to pull this off — she does — but it feels like a goofy detour rather than the start of a promising new era.
[6]
Brendan Nagle: Whether or not it fully works is somewhat besides the point; I simply don’t have it in me to deny something this unabashedly unwieldy. It’s not really ‘fun’ in the way that last year’s hits were — I can’t imagine this going over all that well in a club or at a party, though I suppose that’s less important at the moment. She is grasping for a connection here between the sexual liberation of the 1920s and the social upheaval of the 2020s, and her vehicle for doing so is a flip of a famous Jewish show tune from the ’60s, which has her imagining herself as a wealthy man. (Her first proclamation: “I’d drop my nuts on a hater.”) There’s something to this mess of mixed metaphors, but it doesn’t add up to an entirely clear picture. That tension, however, is intriguing in and of itself.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Points off for sampling Fiddler on the Roof as if it had occurred to no one. Flo’s fine, especially ad-libbing.
[6]