![]() Jay’s strange sense of humor appears regularly, like when he builds a perfect woman who “had an ass like Rosa Acosta” and “smelled like strawberries” on “Rough Love,” or when he’s absorbed by the flaws of Western civilization on “Run and Hide.” The rumors have been justified. Jay’s lines are clever and self-reflective, and his references are evergreen: “Fuck Bill O’Reilly and Rudy Giuliani,” he passionately raps on “New Illuminati.” It’s rewarding to be swept up in his aura, and to feel the magnitude of every strategically placed interlude, every space where the beat rides endlessly, and every roughly mixed verse. ![]() Somehow the record doesn’t suffer from the delay, if anything the often drumless production-heavy on somber piano melodies and lush samples-is timeless. When a slightly unfinished version of Jay Electronica’s Act II appeared this October, it had been a little over a decade after its initial slated release, and most fans had given up hope on it ever actually coming out. It was an album that was rumored to be rap’s next opus before it even materialized. Jay Electronica: Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn) The old world that Dogleg wrote about sucks in its own way, but it’s the world they deserve. You air-drum the little hitch in “Fox” again and again across your steering wheel you throw your chest forward in your home-office at all the perfectly executed half-time breakdowns you do isometric lunges while Stoitsiadis sings about disintegrating. We’re left to sit alone and imagine what these songs should be doing. ![]() The fact that Melee conjures a year so different from the one we got is part of why it leaves such a mark: The histrionics of emo aren’t just dramatic, they’re now science fiction. Singer-songwriter Alex Stoitsiadis was supposed to be hollering his hooks over melodic post-hardcore guitars in roiling 250-cap clubs, and the scenes of heartbreak he described were supposed to be playing out for listeners in real life. –Simon ReynoldsĪ band’s impact shouldn’t be hypothetical, but here’s Dogleg, the debutants of Michigan emo, whose breakout year mostly took place in the imagination. Twice as Tall triumphs not so much for its substance but as a shimmering surface, a landslide victory for the politics of pleasure. “I no be politician/Me no like no politics,” Burna insists-and that rings true. But these Fela-like or Marley-esque moments tend to melt into the glide-and-glisten of the sound. Lyrically, Burna muses on fame, destiny, and, on “Monsters You Made,” the legacy of colonialism in Nigeria. The historical sweep of the music is equally broad, not simply focused on this-minute sounds but spanning decades of influences and collaborators-the latter ranging here from ancestral icon Youssou N’Dour to nineties legends like Timbaland and Diddy, to recent stars like Stormzy. Rhythmically, Burna’s Afro-fusion sound connects homebase Lagos to Kingston, Atlanta, and London. As befits an artist obsessed with being a superhero, Burna Boy’s music is thoroughly posthuman: much of its succulence comes from how the singer’s lilting cadences mesh with Auto-Tune. ![]() Afrobeats is a prime example of the future-pop that actually transpired, a hyper-digital sound far easier and oozier on the ear. Twentieth-century listeners imagined the music of the next millennium as a harsh, mechanistic grind or a frenzy of twitchy glitches. Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal Baby can jump from whining about middle-school crushes to name-dropping denim brands to attempting to encapsulate one of the most tense and unjust moments of our lifetimes. The final addendum came in June: the protest anthem “The Bigger Picture” is a jarring inclusion on an album that isn’t overtly political-and that also makes it perfect. Instantly, it felt more like an unfocused, loose, and chaotic mid-aughts Lil Wayne mixtape with memorable tracks like “All In,” where the flexes are brilliantly batshit (Lil Baby threatens to wreck his Lambo truck just to prove, to no one in particular, that it’s not rented). But with the addition of six songs on the deluxe edition in May, the record kicked dirt on the arbitrary and outdated rules of rap albums. In February, it was a memorable yet conventional 20-track Atlanta rap album. It’s taken time for Lil Baby’s My Turn to grow into the beautiful, sprawling mess that it is. ![]()
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