SoundCloud-adjacent rap, meanwhile, remains a thing…
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[5.67]
Julian Axelrod: This is the Soundcloud wave’s inevitable endpoint: a 16-year-old rapper with glasses and braces surrounded by faceless strippers and million-dollar industry connections. Tecca’s flow is basically 2019 rap fridge magnet poetry, but his chipper yelp helps it go down easy. Unfortunately I’m a sucker for the Lil’s and Young’s and Baby’s of the world, so I’ll be bumping this until September 21 and not a day longer. I have no idea what the future holds for Lil Tecca, SoundCloud rap, or society at large.
[6]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Essentially a hook stretched out to two minutes, “Ransom” is more impressive than its simplicity lets itself on to be. Lil Tecca knows how to contort words to make sure they always rhyme: “want” rhymes with “phantom,” but also “gone” and “dancer” and “Vuitton” and “stunt.” His flow sounds nonchalant in its delivery but it’s unexpectedly slick, and its innate groove finds a counterpoint in the dotted synth notes. His lyrics are right: he ain’t dumb.
[6]
David Moore: Here’s a textbook example of what I’ve started calling modal rap, the phenomenon that’s gotten so popular that at this point about half of (e.g.) Rap Caviar has some version of it. Rather than sing a melody, rappers sing notes on a minor pentatonic scale (5 notes — root, minor third, fourth, fifth, flat seventh) — especially hopping up to the seventh and back down to the fifth a lot. There’s a melody, but it’s improvisatory, roaming freely around the scale of the mode. There’s a pleasant droning quality to it, and it’s a little different from either the single-note rapping or the repetition of a pop hook that previous rap-singers did. Figures will repeat, but they’ll switch to a new pattern in the next verse. And it gives the impression that the song could go on forever, like humming pieces of a song to yourself until you have a memory blank or just move on to something else.
[6]
Iris Xie: The beat is pretty and crystalline and contrasts with Lil Tecca’s easy flow. It’s full of time-tested rhythms, to an almost comfort food level. Really undemanding, but moves gently.
[6]
Alfred Soto: This 16-year-old doesn’t sound like himself so much as an amalgam of Isaiah Rashad and early Kendrick, but I expect mimicry at this age. What I didn’t expect: the no-stress way in which he declares his principles: “They hate the place I’m from/But them n****s don’t know me/they just know the place I’m from.”
[5]
Andy Hutchins: Located at the intersection of the unmooring of geography-based styles — you could not possibly guess Lil Tecca is from Queens based on “Ransom,” though you could maybe suss out the Chief Keef fandom — and the explosive growth of homegrown rappers making it off one spare song, “Ransom” smartly keeps the sing-song hook-to-forgettable verse ratio at 3:1 and does not overstay its welcome. This is a trifle, but trifles go down easy in the summer.
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