the summer playlist dilemma

I know that, as someone who considers himself a (shitty and half-baked) Critic of Music, I’m supposed to absorb music in the same vein that I would paintings or movies: as objects independent of their surroundings, as objects to be consumed, observed, and evaluated while blocking out everything that isn’t explicitly related.  And even when you have artists like Childish Gambino that want to tie other mediums of art into their music, the general response is shut up and focus on making good music the rest of your artsiness can wait.  Unless you're Kanye West, in which case your name is a deus ex machina and you get a free pass for everything.

But anyway: that’s how I feel obligated to consume music, but in reality that’s rarely how.  You’d be hard-pressed to find me sitting down and doing nothing but listening to music, because that forces me to gather up all of my attention and pinpoint-focus it.  And that never goes well.  I’ve always preferred the notion that music exists as a companion and not the main attraction.  

I’m lucky enough to be in Destin, Florida right now, and I just spent about half an hour staring at the tide listening to my favorite album (the album itself is irrelevant), and yesterday I spent hours sitting in the sun letting my summer playlist shuffle through, and it’s become increasingly obvious to me that my favorite music parallels my life.  I can’t listen to Blu’s “j e s u s” or Kendrick Lamar’s “Blow My High” without instantly being transplanted into 80 degree weather, while Flume’s “Holdin’ On” and Grande Marshall’s “Thuggin Shidd Pt. II” sound infinitely better at night.

I’ve tried to make summer playlists before for Cypher League, but it’s never gone too well.  And there’s a reason, I think, that hip-hop’s relatability is often cited as one of its main appeals (and sometimes even as a requirement).  It’s tough to make a universally appealing summer playlist, because my summer playlist maps out, song-by-song, to my life.  It’s possible on some level, I guess (lots of DJs pretty much do this for a living), but I see it as pretentious more than anything.

YG‘s My Krazy Life might be one of the most important rap albums of the last couple years - because for all of the buzz the West Coast has rightfully earned over the last couple years (Odd Future and TDE spearheading it all), Kendrick Lamar is the only West Coast rapper to reaaaaaally make it big.  And we all know that particularly in this musical environment, great music only gets you so far.  ScHoolboy Q can sell all the records he wants, but it’ll take a lot more than amazing albums to get you to where Kendrick is now, and Oxymoron’s quality has been put under heavy scrutiny given that Vince Staples, Freddie Gibbs, and now YG have put out better gangsta rap albums than him in less than a month.  Here’s the deal: YG is potentially the rare artist that has incredible commercial and critical appeal while not appearing to give a shit about either.  DJ Mustard deserves a lot of the credit here (he’s the star of the show for much of My Krazy Life; suffice to say that he’s come a long way since his “Rack City” days), but YG’s a remarkably capable rapper who can pull off “My Nigga” just as well as he can pull off “Sorry Momma.”  A music scene needs its prodigious artists, but also ones that can catapult it into actual relevancy – meaning, among the actual people.  It takes about three songs of My Krazy Life to realize that YG is ruling the summer.

This is probably one of the best Common songs in the past five years (we’ll call it a Common song since he takes all the rapping), including album cuts.  Beyond how unbelievably well No I.D. and the rest of the Cocaine 80s crew bottled up early spring into a single instrumental with twinkling filtered keys, the one long Common verse is essentially Storytelling for Rappers 101.  Common has the unique privilege being of a older rapper statesman without having already established himself as a thug (oddly enough), so he gets to make songs like this without losing any credibility.  And he couldn’t be more perfect to string out a song like this.  I don’t really know what to write about a song like this beyond “this shit is absolutely phenomenal.”  It doesn’t stand out for being one of Common’s most earth-shattering verses or anything – it’s just perfect for what it is.  In a sense, I’m thankful that it never landed on an album.  It’s much better as a quick one-off, a lyrical scrawl in the dirt, a short flash vignette.  

I don’t see how Kevin Gates can record his songs  in any other way than a-line-at-a-time, because the sheer pace at which he slides between growls and wails can’t possibly be human.  "Don’t Know" is some wildness, but “Paper Chasers” is still the best demonstration of everything Gates is capable of doing.  His hook is about eight dense bars but it doesn’t matter, because ears perk up no matter how long it is.  Gripping stuff.