Only one of us took the easy joke…
Taylor Alatorre: “Who Hard as Me,” the album title asks, and with this track Lil Baby offers an unexpectedly candid answer to his own rhetorical question. He may wish for the audience to view Future and the newly freed Thugger as his Atlanta forefathers rather than his active competitors, but he also has to know that side-by-side comparisons are inevitable. So to keep things on a level playing field, he has them all sharing the same setup and same twice-borrowed flow, like a scientist running a controlled experiment. The effect is a thin yet intermittently thrilling sort of cohesion — they’re talking past each other, but they’re reading from the same book, so it sounds like some meaningful Event is taking place. This illusion holds up for a surprisingly long time before stalling out toward the end, with each bit of anticipatory buildup coming off slightly more deflated than the last.
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: Juke Wong rescuing more overrated superproducers than Danja/Scott Storch/Scott Bridgeway.
[4]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Trap in its post-imperial phase; Future & Thugger sound close enough to peak performance that you can trick yourself into thinking it’s still 2016, but the illusion shatters the second you confront anything that they’re saying. The two of them are not given to lyrical clunkers like other aging peers. Their decline is instead registered in a certain calcification — where the prospect of a new verse from either was once freighted with the possibility that you’d get a line like “I’ma ride in that pussy like a stroller” or “bend the curve in a Spur like a MARTA bus,” now they seem utterly locked into the narrowest portions of their lyrical palettes. Lil Baby continues to be inessential on his own music.
[4]
Melody Esme: Welcome back, Thugger! Thank you for keeping this mid track from being worthless. Future’s also here, saying nothing but saying it well. I didn’t hear Lil Baby, so he must be in the background or something. Also there seemed to be a minute and a half of silence before the song started. Weird. Whatever. Pocket full of grandparents.
[5]
Katherine St. Asaph: Dul, dull, and duller.
[4]
Julian Axelrod: If Lil Baby’s charmingly titled WHAM is the rap equivalent of a perfunctory Hollywood thriller dumped in the dead zone of early January, features from Young Thug post-incarceration and Future coming off his commercial peak are the rap equivalent of Love Hurtsadvertised as “starring Academy Award winner Ke Huy Quan and Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose.”
[6]
Mark Sinker: In the after-times we will remember the driving songs as a strange and maybe a beautiful lost luxury: select a chord and glide toward the horizon along it without turning the wheel, forever, krautrock-style, the words congealing into murmured glyphs none can now decode. Dust off the artefact for meaning and microstructure, you say: but just as there are no cars now, there are no archaeologists.
[7]