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Songs about growing up 20179/23/2023 ![]() “Mask Off,” which comes from Future’s eponymous album, one of Nayvadius’s best projects, is a perfect display of why the Atlanta star continues to stand at the forefront of rap. ![]() That in itself is enough of a gift from a man whose music has made the last two years bearable. Either way, we get the pure, almost incomprehensible exhilaration of “Biking”’s closing bars, when Frank yelps at the top of his lungs and the song spins away beneath him. “Solo” is another beautifully melodic mini-crisis, and the parallels between the acid tabs he drops at there could easily be the same ones he’s tripping on while he rolls around on his bike, half in heaven, half in “Hades,” enjoying the sound his wheels make while careening about his own mind. In some ways, the real precursor to “Biking” turns up earlier in Blond(e). It debuted at the very end of Frank Ocean’s Blonded Radio 003, right after “Futura Free” crackled out, and all the gratitude that Frank got through at the end of his Blond(e) closer is put into perspective when JAY-Z wanders in here: “Life goes in cycles, what comes around goes around / So before it goes down / Nigga, get you some icicles.” As much as he’d like to follow JAY-Z’s advice, Ocean sees every moment of joy and every bauble of fame on “Biking” as a springboard into cosmic introspection. “Biking” is pretty and ecstatic, overwhelmed, simple, and complex. K.Dot isn’t alone in having these kinds of internal dilemmas, but for so many rap stars of his level, we never get the privilege of knowing. And as a result, he questions if he even deserves what he has: “All this money, is God playin' a joke on me?” When he wrote “FEAR,” Kendrick felt as if the world was on his shoulders and if he didn’t use his platform and riches for the greater good, then maybe they could be taken away with the quickness. The experiences that he details from his youth make it hard for him to accept that he’s escaped those traumas, at least, in the physical sense. 27-year-old Kendrick’s fears were a bit more familiar, though. The song breezes through young Kenny who, as a child feared his mother’s spankings, and, as a teen, feared losing his life for being wrongfully identified as a gangbanger. And now with DAMN.’s “FEAR,” we know everything that’s frightened him since his childhood. We know that he stayed away from weed because he mistakenly smoked a blunt laced with PCP as a teenager. We know that he saw someone get killed right in front of his eyes before he was barely old enough to go to school. We know how he plotted to get one of his first high school flings. The best artists are the ones who open their full selves to us, even when it’s painful, and these days Kendrick Lamar leads on that front. This is where guitar music is headed next: fascinatingly deluded and lead by a man who can turn a line about “skunk and onion gravy” into a portrait of madness. While it may not be the most emotionally dark song he’s released, it is the most tangibly filthy-a slow, stinking groove of a tune, reeking of jazz cafe toilets and nicotine stained fingertips. Yet with “Dum Surfer,” a standout track from his latest album The OOZ, he emerges from some other underworldly place-a location that could be the sewer but might be the horrible pub where he’s spent the past few days marinating in a pile of sick and booze. Whether in his solo or band work, Archy Marshall has often operated above the ground, somewhere near the moon, or he’s been buried beneath the earth, somewhere close to the seabed. What they don’t have however is King Krule, an artist with a unique singular vision. It’s a disgustingly interesting place to be and most cities have a similarly debilitated piping system running underneath everything. ![]() ![]() The sewer under the streets of London is tightly packed with fatbergs and liquid excrement, horrible brown and greasy stuff squeezing its way through rotting condoms and past umteen rats.
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