We’ve gone a while without covering the guy…
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[6.83]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Future Hendrix continues to turn familiar tropes — spending, sleeping around, survival — into contradictory digital hymns, usually with the utterance of merely a few words. Here it’s just one: “honest,” a slippery term at best no matter how hard the ATLien stresses it as solid fact. “Honest” isn’t staged as a humblebrag, an outright celebration or piece of hagiography (although it momentarily morphs into all three). Instead it feels like he realises there are eyes placed on him from the world outside of Freebandz Manor: “I was gon’ lie to you,” he stresses, moments before scrambling back to his hive. We deal with the info he gives us, and we piece it together the best we can. That’s the best you can do with an admission this alien.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Ah, the first refuge of the asshole: “I’m just being honest”. Like a song-length humblebrag was prompted in any way. But that raspy falsetto could’ve become a fantasia. Future doesn’t need to be understood when he could just be heard.
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: At first it seems like Future presenting his own “Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed,” straightforward boasts turned into emotional flares thanks to the combination of autotuned crooning and piano. Then Future raps “you fuck nigga ya’ll don’t even know struggle/you ain’t even even know why a nigga out here hustling,” a line that puts all the high-life flexing before it into perspective and makes the emotional swell here more than a studio illusion.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Reprising the monosyllabic stresses of “Same Damn Time,” Future’s beleaguered way with vowels opens him to new areas of expression. A mournful piano line made it easier to hear “earnest” instead of “honest.” Move over, bedsit crowd.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: The sleek, uncanny futurism of AutoTune has never sounded more plaintively Blade Runnery than in the hands of Future, whose use of the device invests post-human sonics with the grimy, uncomfortable emotions of street-level human beings. “Honest” twists the formula by throwing up a defensive level of humorous irony — one man’s honesty is another man’s brag-hold-the-humble — but the ghostly-in-the-machine crooning behind him keeps a beating hard uncomfortably close to the electronic sleeve.
[7]
Anthony Easton: The falsetto streaming is pure R&B, the lyrics are hip-hop but sung lower so they seem less aggressive, the crystalline structure is so current it doesn’t quite have a genre. It’s lovely, and intended to be lovely, and in that loveliness there’s a whisper-instead-of-shout cachet. Extra point for the piano.
[8]