Weekly Obsessions | 7/10/17

I listen to a lot of music. Sometimes looking back at my Last.fm or Cymbal and wonder what the fuck kind of music fan I really am. But that’s mainly because I jump from genre to genre so often that I never stay in one place for too long. I’ve been obsessed with a handful of disparate tracks over the past week, and I wanted to take some time to discuss them here. Hopefully, there’s a little something for everybody.

Snail Mail - “Thinning” | Emo

I saw Snail Mail perform live with Girlpool back in May. I’d never heard of them, but they were middling the show, so they were probably quality, right? To say I was blown away by Snail Mail would be an understatement. I was beyond floored watching this band. The lead singer Lindsey Jordan is a transfixing frontwoman, and I’m amazed at the small collection of excellent songs she’s already created by age of seventeen. “Thinning” is a rumbling emo track that flawlessly captures the lethargy of a warm, lazy summer day in suburbia. It’s a track about the simple pleasure (and displeasure) that comes with wasting time.

Half Waif - “Night Heat (Audiotree Live Version)” | Synthpop

Half Waif is the synthy spinoff helmed by Pinegrove’s Nandi Rose Plunkett. The outspoken frontwoman tackles issues of relationships, changing moods, and love in this haunting 3-minute track. It’s a song about losing your sense of self in the face of a relationship. Plunkett’s delicate, layered vocals intertwine over careful drum taps, cymbal crashes, and keyboard swells. It’s an enchanting track from someone that has more to say than words will ever allow.

Phillipa Soo - “Helpless” | Show Tunes

While it’s best experienced in a single sitting as a two and a half hour journey, I’ve recently started listening to individual cuts off Hamilton just to experience flashes of the show’s brilliance in quick, digestible chunks. “Helpless” is a goosebump-inducing track sung from the perspective of Alexander Hamilton’s love interest and soon-to-be-wife Eliza Schuyler. Backed by a chorus of female background singers, this is a love song that recounts the early stages of the historical relationship. It culminates in Alexander asking Philip Schuyler for permission to take his daughter’s hand in marriage. The song explodes in Eliza’s “I do, I do, I do, I do” as the background singers and Hamilton sing different refrains.

21 Savage - “Thug Life” | Hip-hop

While 21 Savage is usually known for overly-dark street music (or “murder music” as he calls it) “Thug Life” off of his recently-released Issa Album is perhaps the brightest and most summery song in his entire discography music. This shimmering ode to 2Pac explodes over a chopped soul sample that peaks with the song’s chorus “I’m thinking to myself you ain’t gang, nigga, fuck you / Feel like 2Pac, Thug Life, nigga, fuck you.” These lyrics provide quite a contrast between the song’s uplifting beat, but somehow it all comes together beautifully in a song that only 21 could have made.

Japanese Breakfast - “Road Head” | Indie Rock

While I have a full review of Japanese Breakfast’s sophomore album Soft Sounds from Another Planet coming up soon, I just can’t stop playing the album’s third single “Road Head.” In the self-directed video, Michelle Zauner finds herself in a toxic relationship with an imposing dark figure. The song itself is a dark but lush depiction of sexuality that ends with a spliced samples of a loop-board-interpolated Michelle placed over an absolutely hypnotic groove.

Vulfpeck - “Cars Too” | Funk

In this Pixar-punned funk song, Vulfpeck finds themselves in their most tripped out and relaxed state yet. It’s an absurdly groovy song, and slower than almost anything else in their repertoire. It’s proof you don’t need to be fast to be funky. In fact, you can slow things down to a snail-like pace and still find room for a bifocal-displacing guitar solo. A choice cut off of a near-perfect debut.

Julien Baker - “Go Home” | Folk

While she’s been on my radar for a while, I’m embarrassed it’s taken me until 2017 to discover Julien Baker’s Sprained Ankle. It’s a heavy-hitting and heartfelt 30-minute listen in which “Go Home” serves as the album’s stark final track. It’s thought-provoking, deflating, and gorgeous all at the same time. A ballad of pure, raw beauty that escalates without warning as Baker sings about skipping her medication and contemplating suicide. I can’t believe it’s taken me two years to discover this record, but I can’t describe how glad I am now that I have something this beautiful in my life.

Bad Clients

I rarely ever talk about “work” on here. I prefer to use this site as an outlet to share music and art… but sometimes life creeps in too. The following is a cover letter that I wrote for a job application. The prompt asked for a “short story about a marketing campaign gone bad.” Unfortunately, I’ve experienced this enough to write candidly on the topic. Fortunately, I can also find the cosmic humor in these experiences, and each one has helped me grow as a writer and a person. I just enjoyed writing this, so I wanted to share it here too. 

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Sometimes clients don’t know what they want. Sometimes clients don’t know what they need. Most of the time they don’t know either. In my experience, that’s been because they see their competition’s work and say “let’s do that” as if it’s that simple. Clients are also extraordinarily risk averse. I recognize a fellow penny-pincher when I see one, and I get it. Especially when we’re talking thousands (or millions) of dollars, month’s worth of development, and something that might put your job on the line, I can understand why you’d be apprehensive.

Especially in advertising where you’re viewed as an outsider, a meddler, someone playing within a realm that the client eats sleeps and breathes. The truth is, you’ll probably never know their product as well as them. What you bring is yourself. You bring an outside perspective that can approach their product (and their obstacle) from a different viewpoint. The problem is, that outsider perspective is scary.

Another problem is clients want something smooth. Something non-threatening. Something amorphous and ethereal. And that’s not bad in theory, but it’s rarely ever the most effective solution. Advertising (and creativity as a whole) is about building something that’s the polar opposite. It’s about creating something pointy, and sticky, and jagged that stays with the viewer. This is the fundamental “battle” carried out in advertising. A war of settling. With our side wanting to create something special and unique, and the other viewing that effort as an artistic wankery, a waste of money, and a risk in every sense of the word.

A few weeks back I met someone at an event who worked for a small boutique advertising agency here in town. They had been working with a local theater to produce a city-wide campaign trying to get people to come in and see live plays. Their current audience is the stereotypical theater-goer: well-to-do middle-aged couples, so this campaign (like many others) was designed to bring in a younger millennial audience that falls outside of their typical age range. Cool, right? He showed me some early-stage mockups of a few executions they were working on, and they looked incredible. And keep in mind; I’m the audience here. I thought these were eye-catching, interesting, and inspired me to read the copy for more info. When I asked him what the client thought, he replied: “Oh, these will never get produced.” I was at a loss. In his words, these were too “extreme” for the client. They looked great, but they were essentially too scary for this client to invest any amount of money into. They wanted something more traditional.

There’s the dichotomy.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It’s a cliche used by daytime TV psychologists, but that doesn’t make it any less true. This particular client essentially wants to retread the same ground they’ve covered in the past in lieu of something new because that traditional approach what’s familiar to them. But you’ll never attract a new audience by retreading old ground. You know who you’re going to attract with that old campaign? The same people who are already in your audience. In their mind, this older idea is a “safer bet” than a scary new campaign. They are at odds with their own goal.

I’ve experienced this myself when working with a local sports team attempting to achieve the same goal as my friend’s theater client. They wanted to attract students and young Portlanders to come to their games. Simple enough. We spent weeks concepting, narrowed it down to the strongest one and got approval. Great! We liked the executions, got approval for the budget, etc. We jumped through all the hoops. Then somewhere along the line, the client got cold feet. They explained that they thought they were going to “pick the best” of our executions and run with those not understanding that this was a full campaign. They basically wanted to cherry pick their favorites, change some copy, change some design, and then running with those.

Man.

I think it’s easy for a client to see a finished product and say “what if we change this word to this?” or “what if we make the logo bigger?” or “why don’t we write this entire thing ourselves?” because at that point the hard part is done. We, as creatives, have designed, written, and carefully pieced together each element of every execution. We’ve done days, weeks, or months worth of work founded on strategic research. Now that the client has something concrete in front of them, it’s easy for them to say “change this word” without knowing how purposeful of a process it’s been up to that point and how long you’ve agonized over every single word of that headline.

It’s an interesting relationship, and at the end of the day they’re the ones paying, so they have final say. It’s a hit we copywriters and designers have to take; we’re ultimately at the whim of the client. That’s the difference between art and advertising. Artists create art for themselves. Advertisers create art for someone else.

I’ve had concepts killed for no reason. I’ve had an ad killed because the client didn’t know what an anvil was. At the end of the day, you have to ride it out and find the cosmic humor in things like that. There’s a reason we sit down and write hundreds of headlines. Not only because the first few are always warm-ups, but because the whole thing is exercise. It’s about digging hundreds of one-foot holes, not one 100-foot hole. There’s beauty in advertising, and I’ve come to adore the entire creative process, flaws and all.

I think some compromises have to be made on both sides of the equation. And not every client is bad, far from it, but if you want to do something new, you’re going to have to try something new. You’re going to have to trust me as someone who eats sleeps and breathes writing the same way you eat sleep and breathe your product. Sometimes the new thing is scary, but it’s better. Sometimes it takes an “out there” headline written by a 24-year-old to strike gold. But trust is a two-way street, and you won’t know until you venture out of your safe zone. A bad client can become a good client, but it takes an attentive account manager to make that happen. It takes a skilled creative team to walk that line. And it takes a client who wants to change.

The ones that do are worth their weight in gold.

Artistic Integrity and Commercial Success | Part 4

This is the fourth, final, and most speculative in a series of four posts on the combative relationship between artistic pursuits and commercial achievements. View the first post here, the second one here, and the third here.

Features Aplenty, Featuring Apathy

Unlike Drake, Travis Scott has yet to release an album in 2017. As a result, the final entry in this four-part series will now shift from a post-mortem into (admittedly) premature evaluation. While Drake isn’t quite out of the woods yet, he’s it at least trending upwards artistically. Meanwhile, Travis Scott has been trending upwards in terms of sales and popularity, but I feel like I’ve seen the inverse in his music. And because he hasn’t released a full project yet, all we can do at this point is look at some of the features and individual songs that Travis has worked on since the release of Birds.

Most recently, Trav dropped a trio of loosies on his SoundCloud: “Butterfly Effect,” “A Man,” and “Green & Purple.” Truth be told, none of these songs did anything for me, and for the most part, they feel just as devoid of life as Birds. Reading shitty comments online is what originally prompted me to think about this intersection between artistic purity and commercial success, but this recent drop of songs really inspired me to start getting my thoughts out on paper. If these songs are indicative of what Trav has in store for us on his 2017 album, I’m genuinely concerned.

But the bigger topic here is “what comes first: art or success?” I think most people would say the first one, and then those creations go on to achieve success (however you define that). However, once you reach a certain point, I think you can start creating from the other end of the spectrum and just let the money be your guiding light for creation. That’s the battle.

But maybe this is all just Travis Scott Fatigue at this point, so let’s look beyond the man’s own tracks at some of his 2017 features. If there’s anything that sparks inspiration, it’s working with other artists and jumping into some more varied sounds, right?

Even without an album drop, 2017 has been a banner year for Trav. With guest appearances on everything from Major Lazer to SZA and everything in between, it seems you can’t officially be a part of the music scene in 2017 without a feature from Travis Scott. One of the weirder tracks is the collaborative effort “Go Off” from the Fate of the Furious Soundtrack. Sure, it’s generic as fuck, but it’s hard to judge anything based off a watered-down lowest-common-denominator platform like Fast and Furious.

Even still, the most offensive Travis Scott feature (and quite frankly my tipping point) was his appearance on Migo’s CULTURE at the beginning of the year… but before breaking that down, I’d like to give some additional context on ad libs.

Get Hyped or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ad Lib

For those unfamiliar, ad libs in hip-hop are distinct phrases that rappers interject within individual lines of their own lyrics. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an ad lib-loving hypebeast (you have to be to start a Desiigner subreddit.) It’s nearly a facet of my personality at this point. Ad libs just get me fired up, and I love how much rappers have been utilizing them lately.

Adlibs are typically used to emphasize a point, excite the audience, or flex after a particularly impressive rhyme. Some artists like Migos use adlibs after nearly every line just to add context and extra texture to their bars. Meanwhile, other people like Chance The Rapper have developed their own repertoire of noises that act as a calling card.

As explained by Pigeons and Planes, ad libs at worst represent “a space-filler, a moment that allows for a word to be repeated, emphasized, or followed by an “uh-huh” or some other bland affirmation.” and at best act as “an opportunity for unique self-expression, a brief moment outside of the lyrics themselves to show character, expand the meaning of the song.”

One of my favorite examples of ad-libbing is Young Thug’s “Halftime” in which he drops a lung-collapsing 12-second “SKRR” forty-four seconds into the track. The prolonged cry lies relatively quietly beneath Thug’s yelped rhymes and just above Kip Hilson’s booming bass-drenched beat. After that, Thug goes on to discuss his eccentric fashion choices and throws off his own rhyming couplet by dragging out the syllables of “recycles” to which he laughs. He’s keeping the listener on their toes. Immediately after that subversion, Thug “winds up” into an increasingly-speedier set of overtly-sexual bars, each of which is punctuated by a series of escalating ad-libbed interjections which Thug himself then interrupts with a reserved “no” right at the rhyme’s climax. The fact that this is all happening in between rapped lines makes the track a treat to listen to and rewards repeated listens. Thug is literally his own backing track. On top of that, this barrage of ad-libs is surrounded by hilariously over-the-top lyrics like “suck my dick like Beavis no, Butthead” and “I just want that neck like a giraffe.” It’s an intoxicating display and one that all happens within the space of a minute on a single verse. Blink and you’ll miss it, but “Halftime” is an absolutely flawless example of ad libs flirting with (and improving) a song as a whole.

I’ve always been a fan of Travis Scott’s adlibs. From the hype-building Straight Up! and It’s Lit! to his trademarked La Flame! He’s made a career (and a name for himself) out of expertly-deployed soundbites. So imagine my surprise when I found myself listening to Migo’s world-conquering CULTURE at the beginning of the year and made it all the way to the album’s penultimate track “Kelly Price” which featured Travis Scott.

I entered hesitantly, given how fresh in my mind Birds was, but I remained optimistic since Travis and Quavo have had a near-impeccable track record up until that point. The song starts with a haunting beat and a hook that finds Quavo running down the typical Migos list of favorite things: Cars. Money. Drugs. Women. Pretty standard stuff so far. Then Travis Scott comes in.

He lazily floats the track by sputtering two words: Flash. Dash. and then drops a “straight-up” adlib. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe I shouldn’t be as offended at this as I am, but I was amazed that this dude just hopped on a track, said two words that barely rhymed and then dropped an ad lib as if he’d just spit some world-shattering bars. It called to mind “Biebs in the Trap” off of Birds in the Trap where Trav opened a verse in an almost identical, but even lazier way. The verse in question reads more like an unrelated grocery list of things that kind of rhyme but just sound cool when thrown together over a particular beat.

As mentioned before, I don’t go to Travis Scott for lyrical bars. So it feels weird to criticize him for verses like the two above… but at the same time, they’re just so far below his already-low bar for lyricism. I’m mainly surprised that he seems to be regressing towards such a simplistic style. One in which he relies almost entirely on production and v i b e s to carry him and his lack of personality or technical skill.

It’s also disappointing because I loved Days Before Rodeo and Rodeo so indescribably, yet I haven’t fully enjoyed anything that he’s put out since 2015. This all ties back to the first post in the series, because right now I’m just bitching that I don’t like the direction an artist is taking.

I Guess That’s It

I guess if there’s any theme to this series, it’s been about expectations, disappointments, and hope. I was expecting a lot from both Drake and Trav in 2016, and they both let me down in different ways. Since then Drake has really bounced back in my eyes, but Travis seems to be continuing down a different path. I know I started this series complaining about people online wanting to dictate artists art… so I won’t do that. All I can do is hope. Hope that he has something grander and more experimental in stock for us.

I believe that Travis has it in him to create more albums on par (and better than) Rodeo, but he could also continue down the “easier” path that’s already laid before him. And I realize it’s a shitty thing for a fan to just say “their old stuff was better.” You can’t expect an artist to just keep remaking an album forever. To do so is to wish stasis and artistic malaise on someone that you’re supposedly a fan of. It’s also hard when Rodeo and DBR are tied to such positive memories in my past, and Birds has no comparable equivalent, but it’s unfair of me to judge an album based on something external to itself.

Earlier this year I actually saw Travis Scott live at Portland’s Moda Center. It was a pretty great show (even if I wasn’t able to snag floor tickets) and oddly relevant to this topic since Drake made a surprise appearance at that show. It was a wild show, but the difference between Travis’ old and new material was night and day. It’s odd because he wanted Birds to get “straight to the meat.” The album was created with stadium tours in mind. According to Scott he quickly learned what songs from Rodeo did and didn’t work live, and that influenced his creative process while making Birds. Maybe I just like the more “intimate” feeling of Rodeo as opposed to the “broad” nature of Birds in the Trap.

Never Taking a Break

Even more recently, Travis Scott did an interview with SHOWstudio. HotNewHipHop had an interesting take on the interview, positing that he would “take a break” from music after the release of his upcoming third album. Travis Scott personally replied to the speculation on Twitter claiming “Nigga I’m never taking a break.”

Reading this exchange filled me with different emotions. First, honestly, a pang of sadness. Despite the recent perceived decline in quality, I would have been extraordinarily sad to see Travis take a break from touring or new material. At the same time, the more I thought about it, maybe a break is just what he needs. I mean, he’s released an album every year since 2013 with one (technically) scheduled for 2017 as well. On top of persistent touring and features, that output has to take a toll on even the most prolific of artists.

Working so tirelessly can be draining. I’ll be a fan of Travis till the end. The man can put on a hell of a show, and he’s released two albums that are absolute classics in my eyes. A true fan is along for the ride no matter what. The albums may vary in wildly in quality, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. Even Weezer still has fans, and in 2016 they released their best album since Pinkerton. I’m not saying Travis is scheduled for a 20-year stretch of disappointment, but I’m just hoping he carves out a niche that inspires.

And when I say “inspires” I’m talking about both himself and fans.

I could just be “aging out” of his music, but I hope not because even through the darkness and malaise of Birds he still dropped “Pick up the Phone” and “Goosebumps” which were some of my favorite tracks of the past year and ones I still spin on a near-daily basis.

I’m a fan. I want the best for Travis. Both commercially and artistically. The hard part is maintaining both without losing yourself.

Artistic Integrity and Commercial Success | Part 3

This is the third (and most negative) installment in a series of four posts on the same topic. This was originally intended to be the last, but I wrote more than I expected, and I wanted to end on a more positive note. View the first post here the second one here, and expect one more wrap-up coming soon.

The New Scott

Before I fully dive into Travis Scott, I feel like it’s important to give some personal context. I can’t decide if that’s because I think memories are important, or because I’m retroactively embarrassed at my own fandom given recent developments, but either way, here’s a quick rundown:

As previously discussed, Trav has released some of my favorite hip-hop albums of the past few years. His 2015 debut Rodeo is one of my all-time favorites, and one of the handful of albums released that year that made me “believe” in hip-hop as a genre. That’s a powerful notion. And even if the album has some wack bars, it’s production, aesthetic, and sonic approach are all so impeccable that I’m willing to overlook a handful of goofy lyrics.

As great as Rodeo is, it (and Travis Scott as an entity) are prime examples of style over substance. And don’t get me wrong, there are some legitimately great songs on this album, but as a whole, Rodeo undeniably relies on textures and production to make up for its lyrical shortcomings. I’ve already made it clear that I don’t think lyrics are music’s end all be all (even for hip-hop), but I can totally see how someone approaching this album from a traditional rap mindset could leave Rodeo disappointed if they came in looking for clever writing.

But this is all me preemptively addressing valid criticism. I personally think that every track on Rodeo is great for one reason or another, and my positive memories associated with the album are more powerful than any objectivity I can ever offer up. In fact, I loved Rodeo so much that the next summer I ventured further back into Scott’s discography and found myself spinning his prior release Days Before Rodeo. I listened to the mixtape more times than I ever would have expected, and it ended up becoming my second-most played album of 2016 and currently sits at my 7th most played album of all time on last.fm. So yeah. I like that album quite a bit too.

Many of the same criticisms of Rodeo could also be applied to Days Before, but (again) I’m willing to overlook those shortcomings for the overall experience of the tape. So as I ravenously devoured these two albums I found myself rapidly advancing up the next step of my obsessive fandom staircase. I collected everything Travis-related that I could get my hands on. From tracking his features to obsessively compiling my own B-sides album it was safe to say I was in full-on hype mode.

Now is when crushing reality sets in. I’ve already linked to this reddit comment detailing the history of Travis’ broken promises in the lead-up to his second album, but I think it bears repeating. Delays and false release dates are nothing new for Travis, but this timeline highlights the absurdity of this particular album’s cycle. As someone following Travis very closely at this time, it was disheartening to have nearly weekly promises that ended up broken and eclipsed by yet another revised “announcement” the following week.

Things began to look up in June of 2016 when Travis dropped the Young Thug and Quavo-infused “Pick up The Phone.” Already a known quantity for months at that point, and fraught with last-minute legal troubles, it was a relief simply to have a fresh Travis song. I won’t get too deep into it here, but PUTP was one of my favorite songs last year and more recently has gone on to become my most listened to track of all time on last.fm within a year. It’s a breezy, ad lib-riddled summer banger. The syrupy bass line filled with intermittent 808 taps and distorted steel drums combines into a drugged-out soundscape that serves as the perfect backdrop for the three artists sharing the track.

“Pick up the Phone” felt like a positive sign to me. I couldn’t stop playing it, and it became my summer anthem within a matter of weeks. If this is the type of stuff Travis had in store for us on his next album, then maybe all the delays will have been worth it. And according to Travis, all his singles and loosies up to this point weren’t even on the album, because he wanted to give listeners a ‘fresh experience’ on their first listen. So if “Pick Up The Phone” wasn’t even good enough to make the cut, then I was officially hyped.

Travis followed that single up weeks later with a small feature on G.O.O.D. Music’s “Champions” another summer anthem that celebrates the return of Gucci Mane and showcased a rotating cast of hip-hop’s current stars and up-and-comers. Champions specifically brings to mind memories of my graduation which happened around the time of its release. In fact, my nostalgia for this track is so strong that I’ve even downloaded the version ripped from the radio because the drops evoke waves of nostalgia in me. I still remember sitting underneath Portland’s Moda Center in a cap and gown surrounded by friends and checking my phone in between conversations to see the explicit version of the track had been officially released. This comment thread specifically made me laugh so much that I still have the screencap of it saved in my phone.

But I’m getting horrifically off-topic. All signs were pointing towards a great release as Trav continued to promote his upcoming album. As mentioned above, the lead up to Birds was essentially a weekly string of broken promises and unfulfilled blue balls. And I get that it’s selfish to “expect” an album, but when you repeatedly say ‘my album is coming out in X days’ or “tonight” I’ll start to get pissed after the third or fourth time.

In early August Trav ended up droppings two loosies on his Apple Radio show: “The Hooch” and “Black Mass” they were both cool… but I was glad they were just loosies he was tossing off on his radio show. Weeks later, September 2nd he finally dropped his sophomore album Birds in the Trap Sing Mcknight.

I remember I was on vacation at the time and without a music streaming service. It agonized me that I couldn’t listen to the album until I got home. All I could do was enjoy my vacation *shudders* and read comments online.

They were exceedingly negative.

How could this be? I’d seen this happen before. In some ways I was glad. Whenever the internet mob preemptively lowers my expectations like this, I’d come out the other side enjoying what they were bitching about far more than I would have otherwise (see: Mass Effect 3, and Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book.) But I saw the bright side. I knew that when I did get back home and sit down to listen to the album, I should lower my expectations. If your expectations are low enough anything can exceed them, right?

Right?

The Problem With Birds

Birds In the Trap feels like drab, dark, and lifeless background music. That’s not to say I don’t like dark albums, there’s a time and place for them… but it just feels so incomplete and half-hearted here. Birds is devoid of life. It is (intentionally?) poorly mixed, lacking of substance, and the album art looks like an edgy Myspace background circa 2006. Look. I’m not saying Rodeo was high art or that it even had anything new to say, but it’s far more substantive than Birds ever tries to be. What Rodeo brought to the table was a metric fuckton of different ideas and sounds that were all produced impeccably. It commands attention and each track sounds different from the last. We ended up with the polar opposite on Birds.

As a person that talks about music, it feels like a cop-out to just link to someone else’s review, but The Needle Drop’s dissection of Birds is a pretty spot-on breakdown of what feels wrong with the album. Going back to the idea of an album’s substance, Birds feels like the album equivalent of an item off the McDonald’s Value Menu. It’s about the lowest of the low (even for fast food) but it still qualifies as “food” on a technical level.

At the risk of making a horrific pivot (or just to take a break from negativity), check out this video about True Detective. If you can’t watch all eleven minutes skip straight to 2:40 and watch the section on Rogue One. I can’t tell if this is a hyper-specific example, a universal one, or just something that I’m trying to crowbar in because I’m in the mood to rewatch True Detective, but this video felt oddly poignant. Specifically, the line “when the plot is motivated by a writer or director’s aesthetic needs instead of character motivation, something just inevitably feels missing.” To me, this describes Birds to a tee.

As mentioned ad nauseam, I do not go to Travis Scott for hyper-lyrical bars, so I didn’t expect that from Birds. What I did expect was thick production, varied textures, and (at the very least) some competent song structure. I ended up receiving very little of anything. It felt like Travis was chasing some aesthetic desire and forwent anything else that made his work interesting previously. And don’t get me wrong, I like some songs off of Birds, but in the year since its release, I’ve realized that it has become symbolic of him not trying.

The single standout from Birds is “Goosebumps” a Kendrick Lamar-collab with a drowsy bloop-filled beat accompanied by one of the most infectious hooks I’ve heard since “Pick up the Phone.” And speaking of “Pick up the Phone” the song ended up on the album. This is after Trav promised that Birds would be “all new material.” After he had already released the song three months prior in June. After it had already been included on Young Thug’s JEFFERY as a bonus track in August. Similarly, the sparkly weekend collab “Wonderful” ended up on Birds as the album’s closer after having already been released as a Soundcloud throwaway at the end of 2015. And that was the album’s closing track.

The whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. Alongside these repurposed tracks were songs like “SDP Interlude” that just come off as half-finished, under-developed scraps of songs that Travis just decided to toss onto the album. It was underwhelming in every sense of the word and didn’t clear my already-low expectations. But maybe this was just a sophomore slump. A byproduct of constant touring combined with the monumental task of following up an excellent predecessor.

This is truly my hope, but with each new piece of music emerging from Travis’ camp, I become less and less hopeful in a return to form anytime soon. I’ll dive deeper into my thoughts on Travis Scott’s current output and future in the fourth and final post coming very soon.

Read Part 4 Here

Artistic Integrity and Commercial Success | Part 2

This is a follow-up to my last post about Drake, Travis Scott, and artistic integrity.

A Mixed Bag

We now find ourselves in the summer of 2017. Almost a year removed from both Drake’s Views and Travis Scott’s Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. I’ve personally had enough time to fully digest each release, and more importantly to this conversation, I’m beginning to see how these two albums will sit in their respective artist’s discographies. We have just enough distance to see how these two have changed and where they’re heading next.

At the time of writing, Drake has already released a follow-up to Views in the form of a “playlist” titled More Life. Meanwhile, Travis Scott has released a slew of features, loosies, leaks, and other things that sound like a euphemism for shitting your pants. Since Trav’s position is a little more complex (and part of his inevitable multi-month-long lead up to his next album), I’ll start this by diving into Drake and his year since Views.

Personal Views

My primary complaint with Views was that it was just okay. If You’re Reading This made me a fan of Drake the year before, and I was disappointed that his next proper follow-up was so unsatisfying. I liked what Views was going for: a musical journey through the seasons in Toronto… but the album didn’t quite stick the landing. All that concept ended up meaning was that there were three types of songs on the album: R&B, hip-hop, and dancehall.

One of the reasons Drake works so well as an artist is because he walks the line between singer and rapper like no one else. Adding dancehall into the equation threw him off his own game. If You’re Reading This was almost entirely rap (which made it an easy entry point for me) but his older albums tend to walk a much finer line. On Views you just have individual songs that do one of these things (and don’t do it particularly well). “Redemption” is a classic Drake relationship slow jam. “Hype” is a braggadocious turn-up track. “Controlla” is one of Drake’s first forays into his Caribbean island sound. None of these tracks are too offensive on their own, but as an album, it proves to be a jarring jagged listen rather than a compelling journey.

In addition to this third-wheel genre-hopping love triangle, Views came with some of the corniest lyrics in Drake’s entire career. From Cheesecake Factory namedrops to questionable punchlines, the tiredness of Views has already been covered pretty extensively by the internet at large. If you’d like a good laugh I’d highly recommend checking out Dead End Hip Hop’s discussion of the album (timestamped for maximum enjoyment).

And on top of all this, Views comes in at 81 minutes long, it was loaded with uninspired features, retreads of previous ideas, and Drake even tossed “Hotline Bling” on the end to artificially inflate his numbers. As a result, the whole thing just feels like one big overly-long incongruous jumble of Drake.

More Life, More Everything

In March of 2017, Drake released his next project, a “playlist” titled More Life. Coming in at 22 tracks stretched across 82 minutes, More Life falls victim to some of the same pratfalls as Views, but manages to improve on nearly all fronts.

First off, there’s a discussion to be had here on what the fuck it means to be a “playlist” as opposed to an album. It may just be a cop-out to avoid being criticized in the same way as an album, but perhaps because we have no barometer for it I ended up liking More Life far more than Views.

Viewing it as a playlist actually, lends credence to the different sounds that Drake flirts with. It allows freer experimentation and doesn’t bound the release to any traditional musical box. And I know I just shit on Views for being uneven, but the lack of thematic cohesion actually works in More Life’s favor. It allows Drake to hone his dancehall obsession, experiment with harder beats, dip into grime, and utilize a deeper roster of guest features. In fact, there are some songs on More Life that don’t contain any Drake at all. It’s interesting to pose “no Drake” as a point in favor of a Drake release, but I suppose that’s just another side effect of being a playlist.

Unlike Views, More Life is largely segmented by genre but allows each “sound” to exist compartmentalized in its own little section. The album opens with “Free Smoke” a hard-hitting rap intro which immediately bleeds into “No Long Talk” a UK-influenced club banger. From there the album throws you an immediate curve ball with the dancey “Passionfruit” which officially serves as the introduction to the Dancehall section of the album.

The dancehall stretch of songs peaks with “Blem” easily Drake’s best dancehall track, and one of my new personal favorites. “Blem” leads directly into “4422,” a Sampha solo track that breaks up the Drake monotony, transitions perfectly to a surprise Lil Wayne interlude and then melts into “Gyalchester” one of Drake’s best pump-up songs of all time.

“Gyalchester” is followed by a slew of traditional rap tracks with features from the likes of Travis Scott, Skepta, and Young Thug. From there “Nothings Into Somethings” marks the album’s pivot into the albums R&B section. Finally, the album’s final handful of tracks shuffle through a little bit of each sound in Drake’s repertoire.

All of this leads to the final track in the playlist “Do Not Disturb” a pensive Snoh Aalegra-sampling track that finds Drake reflecting on his life since the release of Views. In one of the songs more telling lines Drake explicitly talks about where he was mentally while making his last album 

“Yeah, ducked a lot of spiteful moves / I was an angry youth when I was writin’ Views / Saw a side of myself that I just never knew”

In addition to name-dropping the title of the album, it’s also tradition for the last Drake song tends to be one of the most reflective on each record. While that usually means self-aggrandizing and reflecting on his own accomplishments, the line above stuck out like a sore thumb to me upon first listen. It shows that a surprising amount of development and growth has happened in the past year, and it’s interesting to see Drake reflect negatively on an album he’d released less than a year ago. It also spoke to people like me (or Drake fans in general) who felt let down by Views.

This line combined with an equally self-aware voicemail from his Mom on “Can’t Have Everything” have completely quelled my fears of another artistically-regressive Drake album. That said, there’s still plenty wrong with Drake. From writer’s camps to being a culture vulture, to losing his soul, there’s still lots to criticize. Separate the art from the artist and all that.  

I guess it’s apparent I like More Life quite a bit. The album is as long as Views, but manages to handle everything it does better. From the lack of dumb-smart punchlines to a more varied (but organized) listen, I think releasing a “playlist” freed Drake up to experiment more which is exactly what Views was lacking.

I’m mainly happy that he got out of this apparent rut, and doesn’t seem to be compromising his artistic vision to chase a sound that will make him money. At this point, he’s one of pop’s biggest stars, and people will listen to anything he puts out, so maybe this is all a moot point, but at the very least he’s trying out new things and not chasing money. He’s essentially too big to fail, so when the money chases you there’s really no need to get validation through numbers.

If releasing a playlist frees you up to more artistic experimentation then it’s better for Drake, the listener, and the culture. If breaking out of traditional marketing cycles and release dates gives you more mental energy then go for it. Drake obviously saw Views for what it was: a flawed album. You can criticize Drake for a lot of things, but you have to admit that this level of self-awareness and reflection is pretty rare for someone as big as him. I appreciate the fact that music’s biggest star can still take risks, even when there’s an easier path that already exists. 

Read Part 3 Here