Nicki Minaj, Again 12/22/23 BY: IAN SHERRY On December 8, 2023, Nicki Minaj released her first album in 5 years: Pi nk Friday 2 . Nicki Minaj embodies a unique position in today’s music landscape as one of the most simultaneously overplayed and underrated artists of all time. Like her pal Drake, her popularity often overshadows her technical ability, and her sound. Both artists are dismissed as one-dimensional based on the portion of their work that hits the charts. This is understandable, considering both artists produce stylistically unattractive moments on almost every album. However, if you really dig into Drake, you’d hear a decent rapper. Not my favorite by any means, but decent. Similarly, but to the extreme, if you really dig into Nicki Minaj, you’d hear one of the most skilled rappers of all time. Her influence on rap as an industry is immeasurable. From her mainstream sexual branding to her marketing and release strategies, to her pure skill and style on the microphone, she sets the standard for any rapper wishing to straddle the lines of hip-hop and pop. Minaj, in my book, is the undisputed queen of rap. This year, she was tasked with expanding her legacy after years away. Nicki Minaj, as good as she is, has never been the strongest at crafting a well-executed, complete album. This holds her back from certain elite conversations. Her flows and bars are consistently elite, but her thematic focus and song curation occasionally fall short. This isn’t to say she hasn’t made good albums, in fact she has some classics. But their status benefits greatly from their chart-topping hits and far-reaching influence. Even if they weren’t perfectly crafted masterpieces, Pink Friday , The Pinkprint , and Queen defined their respective eras of mainstream rap and have aged gracefully due to Minaj’s looming presence and unshakeable relevance. However, until the recent release of Pink Friday 2 , Nicki Minaj hadn’t made an album since 2018, raising the question: can she deliver in a culturally significant way? Although Minaj is still relevant, five years removed, she’s a clear notch below her prime popularity. Mainstream rap is heavily reliant on being in style, and she hasn’t been this far on the outside since she secured a feature on Kanye West’s “Monster”. That was in 2010, this is 2023. The Samples Danny Brown revealed sometime in the last 10 years (time flies when you can’t find the date of the video) that when constructing his critically acclaimed album Atrocity Exhibition , he expended so much of his production budget on securing the rights to samples, prior to rollout and other post-production expenses, that he initially lost money on the album. An up-and-comer at the time, Brown’s inexperience with fiscal management and industry norms, coupled with his enthusiasm for the music, led to him being broke when his 2016 record was released, and consequently, he stayed in the red for the years that followed. While I’m certain Nicki Minaj wasn’t scrolling through Danny Brown content on Instagram, she seems to be very aware of her capacity for luxurious samples. She lets you know immediately with “Are You Gone Already” , which samples Billie Eilish’s “when the party's over” . Off the top of my partially focused head, I can’t think of any other song that samples a song that charted so recently. If you read the Genius annotation, this is pitched as a collaboration between Eilish, Minaj, and FINNEAS, but in reality it’s a remix of the pop hit with a partial lyrical alignment between the rap verses and sampled refrain that sets the tone. Meanwhile on “Pin k Friday Girls” and “Super Freaky Girl,” Minaj attempts to assemble poppy anthems around “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” and “Super Freak,” respectively. A common criticism of rap, uttered by many including Prince, is that sampling is a way to construct your ‘music’ entirely around someone else’s work. This implies that a rapper jumps in the studio and begins vocalizing over a slightly restructured version of someone else’s original. Anyone who’s listened to intricate sample-work, (check out The Alchemist), would understand this is an inaccurate, outmoded take. And now you’ll have to brace yourself for an immediate contradiction. On all three of the aforementioned songs, Minaj only makes slight alterations to the original song, cutting verses and adding drums and bass. She even lazily chipmunks Blondie’s “Heart of G lass” f or the chorus of “My Life” . The basic repackaging of all these former hits allows Nicki Minaj to lay down different personas over a canvas that was painted for her. This is a fine strategy on paper, but so is fouling Shaquille O’Neil every time he touches the ball. It’s just not what we’re here for. Danny Brown didn’t have the money to spend, but he spent it anyway on creative sample selection, which he wove into one of the most unique individual album soundscapes in hip-hop history. So after five years away, Nicki Minaj had plenty of money to spend, and she chose to spend it on a random shuffle of chart-topping hits. The Flows Switching to the positive, Nicki Minaj has one of the most multifaceted vocal delivery skillsets of all time. She can rap in a variety of speeds, moods, even accents. At this stage in her career, sustaining an elite level of vocal expertise is easier said than done. Legendary rappers like Eminem or Q Tip, for example, have been rendered vocally unimpressive in recent years. In other words, it’s possible to age out of your flows. Minaj hasn’t. Pink Friday 2 ’s second track, “ Barbie Dangerous,” comes out firing as the jumping-off point of the album. She works with pace and precision, setting a high standard that she maintains for the majority of the album. Whether it’s going bar-for-bar with J Cole (he’s on a tear) on “Let Me Calm Down,” embracing Lil Uzi Vert’s 2023 sound on “Everybody,” bringing in the island sound on “Forward From Trini,” or parading her early-career princess persona on “Pink Friday Girls,” Minaj delivers on expert rap performance after another. That kind of versatility is invaluable. It often allows Minaj to act as her own feature, considering her seamless shapeshifting from verse to verse. Frankly, that’s what holds this album together. The Givens If you listen to Nicki Minaj, this album is nothing new. We know she can rap, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we know she can’t sing. She does it anyway, often singing on her own choruses and refrains despite her access to a plethora of alternative options. This is a stylistically misguided choice that rappers like J Cole also fall victim to. However, unlike Cole, she often compiles mistakes by failing to supply sufficient instrumental backing on songs that emphasize her singing. But, like I said, I knew it was coming. I also knew this album would bring a mixed bag of features. J Cole and Lil Wayne deliver on tracks 6 and 7, while Drake and Future flop on tracks 9 and 19. I also knew there would be a mix of moods, which could be interpreted as aimless or diverse. “Fallin 4 You” is one of the best executed, vulnerable songs of Minaj’s career, while “Bahm Bahm” mirrors Minaj’s classic energy-infused club-radio formula. I knew the album would be defined more by its hits than skips. I knew the Barbs would make sure the album charted regardless of merit. I knew what to expect, and although I hoped for something else, (more out of desperation for the unpredictable than dislike for the usual), I was right. Nicki Minaj made another album, and it’s much like her others. Its mainstream relevance is measured in comparison to her past releases, but in proportion to her current cultural standing. The album scores points for it’s highlights, “Red Ruby Da Sleeze” and “Super Freaky Girl,” to name a few, but loses points since those singles were released 9 and 16 months ago respectively. Pink Friday 2 gave me so little to expand upon that I spent most of my energy analyzing Nicki Minaj’s mindset around sampling. So, to bring this review to a conclusion in a fittingly generic fashion, here’s a cliche to summarize the experience of Pink Friday 2 : For every push in one direction, there’s a pull in another. My disappointment stems from predictability, yet the inalienable positives of the Nicki Minaj sound push this album slightly into positive territory. I think the blank stare with which I’m listening to and writing about this album is the best summation of its quality, but I’ll give it a score nonetheless. Pink Friday 2 is a 5.3/10.

UTOPI A 8/4/2023 On July 28, 2023, Travis Scott released his fourth solo album, UTOPIA . Finally. Travis Scott is one of the most prolific production-focused rappers of all time, and one of the most important figures in the music industry today. From his instant classic albums Rodeo and ASTROWORLD to his various chart-topping singles, he’s had a serious impact on the mainstream of rap, at points rising to heights of popularity no rapper has seen since Kanye West’s prime. His impact stretches beyond numbers and popularity too. His songwriting and production skills have been an asset to many studios, but most importantly, his musical versatility and range of influences have played a huge role in bridging the gap between production giants like West and Metro Boomin. Scott is an industry fixture, but it’s been a minute since we’ve heard that signature style of his. It’s no secret that Travis Scott needed some time away following the tragic events of the Astroworld Festival. He found himself in the center of a unique kind of controversy, one that no doubt weighs on him as heavy as nearly anyone else. As a fan it's a hard thing to navigate, and as the artist himself I’d imagine it's nearly impossible. That did concern me for several reasons. Scott thrives when he’s smack in the middle of the industry action. ASTROWORLD is one of the most successful pop/rap albums ever, and a big reason for that is the timing. Scott nailed the sound of the time, brought in the right features, and added his unique set of tools. It simply wouldn’t have been possible if he wasn’t so ‘in the know’. So, naturally, I was concerned he couldn’t replicate it while avoiding the spotlight (not that a man of Scott’s popularity and associations could ever disappear completely). Fortunately, Scott answered many of my lingering questions when the extensive UTOPIA rollout began. A rollout which, by the way, got on my nerves just a bit. Just give me the music Travis. But, I have to admit his strategy paid off. Instead of attempting to capture pop and rap in a bottle once again, Scott moved out of Astroworld and built a new one: UTOPIA. Travis Scott chose to begin his 2023 release with “HYAENA” . The energy, pace, and atmosphere do a good job of introducing UTOPIA . It’s just hectic enough to engage the listener but not so much that it loses them off the bat. Track 2 continues to settle into the same vibe. “THANK GOD” , while it isn’t one of the strongest songs on the album, does its job. To me, it takes too long to catch its groove, and although it does to an extent in the end, I don’t think it works outside of this chronological context. Speaking of context, “MODERN JAM” isn’t concerned with that. It’s a fun song, Teezo Touchdown is good for that, and it feels like Scott had fun making it. To be clear, the general sound is the same, as is much of this sonically coordinated album. It’s just the pace, intention, and vibe that are responsible for the shock. Maybe shock is what Travis Scott wanted here. The beat walks along nicely and the vocal effects are great. This definitely feels like the first song Scott wants his listeners to bring out of UTOPIA and into their playlists. In another somewhat jarring transition, Scott follows track 3 with “MY EYES” . An immediately different feel, this song is Scott’s best since ASTROWORLD . It resides within the sound of the album but executes something completely different. A spacey synth sits on top of a mild drum and bassline, as a muddied Justin Vernon vocal guides track 4 into its first verse. Scott drops in a pretty average verse, but pitches and tunes his vocal to the point that it's just another tool painting the ambient soundscape. The chorus hits and Vernon chimes in for another line as the beat begins to switch. Travis Scott’s first beat switch of the album is perfectly executed. A new faded sample sits over the top and the ambience grows louder, as does the new drum and bass fueled low end. Scott’s second verse sinks into the middle of the mix, allowing the beat to rock and the pace to catch on completely, leading perfectly into track 5. This is the epitome of what Travis Scott has given himself the opportunity to do from a production standpoint on UTOPIA . It’s the Utopian sound. THE LOW-END If you followed the UTOPIA rollout as closely as I did, you’d be very interested to hear how it sounds. You’d also be relieved to find that it does have a distinct sound. However, I think calling it the ‘Utopian’ sound is counterintuitive in a sense. This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy it, but the implication is that this is Travis Scott’s musical sweetspot, his Utopia. One he could settle down in forever. I disagree. While it is certainly a strong and polished mix of his catalog’s strongest sounds and influences, this is just one stop on the road. But, it’s an interesting stop so let’s go deeper. The key to this sound, as far as I can track it, comes down to the low-end. ASTROWORLD ’s strength was in the airiness of the production; UTOPIA has none of that. Its grimy industrial feel is the product of diluted soundbites, endless layering, and prominent drums that come together in an organized clutter, and it feeds into one of Scott’s biggest influences (keep reading for more on that, sucker). The only reason these moving parts are able to combine so cohesively is because the low-end is there to center the listener. “SIRENS” is a great example. The beat builds on a rising sample of New England’s “Explorer Suite” and a blown out sample of Amanaz’s “Nsunka Lwendo” . The drums rise to the top of the sound, leaving just the bass on the bottom. With all the sound swirling atop the vocals, the listener could easily get swept up and taken out of the groove at the hands of audible chaos, but because of the strong baseline, the ear has something to return to. The bass is primarily looped underneath, and its consistent presence subtly holds the listeners ear down just enough to keep them on rhythm. It works, as does the Utopian sound. Moving chronologically, Track 5 is another one of those album-worthy songs that may not stand up outside this context. I like “GOD'S COUNTRY” , even though it isn’t a Blake Shelton cover. It ups the energy a bit coming out of “MY EYES” and leads nicely into “SIRENS”. “SIRENS” is a bit of a new look for Scott. Working with dual samples, the disjointed sample-work comes together into a beat that is plausibly within his reach but not something we’d heard prior to UTOPIA. Scott’s performance is alright for what it is. On a song like this, he just needed to keep up, lyrics go by the wayside. In many ways this is what Lil Uzi Vert was trying to accomplish on their last album. They should’ve spent some more time with Travis Scott. Back on topic, “SIRENS” finishes with a fun little skit in which Travis Scott declares his hotel room Utopia; I guess it had nothing to do with music after all. Drake time! I have never been more excited to hear Drake than when he spoke his first line on “MELTDOWN” . It must be because his and Scott’s previous collaborations include “SICKO MODE” and “Bubbly” . Immediately I am hoping for a chart-topping track 7 complete with fun verses and a beat switch. I’ll have to check back on the charts in a week, but my wishlist was otherwise covered. Drake delivers my favorite verse of his in a long while. Firing shot after shot in a voice just above a whisper, he made his mark. Travis Scott matches him, grinding along with a simple but polished trap beat. Scott uses the hook to switch up the beat a couple times and his verses keep the energy going. It’s a good sign when the artist has complete control over their audience, and Scott has claimed it at this point in the album, as track 8 rolls in. “FE!N” gives the listener no time to recover from “MELTDOWN”. The high-octane Playboi Carti feature sparks the fire that the bass-boosted beat continues to fuel. His impact is so big that it’s hard to tell it’s a Travis Scott song, in a good way. “DELRESTO (ECHOES)” is a similar situation. Travis Scott does such a great job of fusing UTOPIA and Beyonce’s RENAISSANCE , it’s hard to tell whose album this is. Scott's verse follows a classic Beyonce opening verse. He holds his own, singing the first part then rapping for the remainder of what feels more like a Travis Scott feature on a Beyonce song. If you liked Beyonce’s 2022 project, this may likely be your favorite song on UTOPIA, and the way Justin Vernon finishes it off, I couldn’t blame you one bit. THE CHAMELEON There’s a rumor that UTOPIA will be the last solo rap project Travis Scott releases. This means, supposedly, that he will turn to straight production. Naturally, upon hearing this my gut reaction was disappointment. However, as I listened to this record with that in the back of my mind, disappointment turned to excitement. This is partially because the idea of his production skills showing up more often on other artists’ projects is extremely enticing, but even more so because Travis Scott is a chameleon. UTOPIA , despite its generally laser focused soundscape and consistent stylistic choices, displays a great deal of diversity in Scott’s performances to go with subtle shifts in the production. Scott is not the most technically strong rapper, but he knows that. That’s why he often leans into his signature delivery: autotune supported by adlibs (though he shows it less on this record). However, he also has a keen awareness that this doesn’t fit every musical scenario he whips up. That’s when he, especially on this record, begins to utilize his influences. Kanye’s influence is forefront in lot’s of Scott’s rapping, but he showed more on this record. I heard Joey Bada$$'s (or is it Bada$$'$) influence down the stretch of “SKITZO” and on “LOOOVE” Scott’s performance skews towards Kid Cudi who is featured on the song. “I KNOW?” is the best example. This is the closest to an ASTROWORLD song we get on this album. It has more air in the production than the rest of the album. This calls for a more filling vocal performance, which usually results in features. Scott decides to go for no features and delivers my favorite performance of his on the album. The chorus, which provides just the right amount of breathing room for this kind of uninterrupted beat, is a page straight from Drake’s book. It sets him up for his signature delivery on the first verse, but knowing 3:30 of this can get repetitive, he switches his delivery again. For the second verse he taps into The Migos’ book, flipping back and forth between bubbly autotune and a more restrained untouched vocal painted with adlibs. He even throws in some whispered adlibs for the length of the song reminiscent of Kendrick on Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers . It’s one of the strongest songs on the album, and although it seems like it was by committee, it’s all just Travis Scott. Scott’s ability to shift around vocally not only allows him to create a more interesting solo album, theoretically, it could help him slot into more diverse features. This would be a great tool for any of his future projects as a producer who might feature on his own beats. Which reminds me, his chameleon in ability is not limited to rapping. Scott did a great job on UTOPIA of creating different sounds within his own, depending on who he had in the studio. From his NYC hardcore style sample-work on “LOST FOREVER” with the help of The Alchemist, to the perfect RENAISSANCE impression on “DELRESTO (ECHOES)”, Scott has an ability to accommodate any artist he might want to. It’s notable to say the least. Track 10, “I KNOW?” , is the second Drake feature on the album. Oh, I’m sorry, that’s just Travis Scott singing the chorus. Beyond Scott’s vocal shapeshifting, what caught my eye here is the adlibs. Scott seems to have decided to shy away from his signature autotuned-adlib delivery until “I KNOW?”. Something I didn’t see coming, and although I have no issues with his vocal deliveries in general on this album, when he executes like he does on this song his verses never fall flat. There are lots of ways to deliver energy in a rap verse, this is just Travis Scott’s most consistent shot in my opinion. Travis Scott knows how to make a really catchy song for most hip-hop audiences. Track 11 covers another audience. This is my first intentional experience with Rob49, and he brings a certain energy to the beginning of “TOPIA TWINS” . I was questioning the direction of the song when Rob49 jumped in how he did. I liked it, but there was no verse even close to that direction on UTOPIA to that point. I should’ve known 21 Savage could match it. 21 is one of the best feature rappers ever and this is no exception. He steps into the beat perfectly, bridging the admittedly different energies presented by Travis Scott and Rob49, and making “TOPIA TWINS” the fifth straight stand-alone song. Before I even get into “CIRCUS MAXIMUS” , I’ll say this makes six. I like The Weeknd and what he brings to the music industry, but when I saw his name I rolled my eyes. Scott did a really tasteful job of incorporating different sounds into his without departing what makes this album itself to this point, but I figured this was the end. The Weeknd’s sound, at its best, is ultra clean and lives in the high end of the mix. His Canadian vocals soar on top of well produced pop/r&b instrumentals. In his early days he showed the ability to touch on hip-hop, on House of Balloons especially, but that was a long time ago and he hasn’t been back there in his current form. Of course, Travis Scott pulled him right back. Swae Lee leads into track 12 nicely, and rising synths sit on top of the drums as Scott’s middling verse serves to build tension, accompanied by some background screaming. Then one of the purest voices in music today cuts in. The Weeknd provides a temporary release in tension, but the beat revamps and continues to build. The ultimate result is one of the most epic sounds on the album, and another success for Scott. In most cases on this album Scott’s ability to seamlessly accommodate an artist is what makes the song; here it’s The Weeknd’s ability to adapt, despite having an unbeatable formula within his solo work. Hats off to both artists, and Swae Lee too I suppose. THE YEEZUS EFFECT I’m tired of comparing UTOPIA to Travis Scott’s previous albums. Let’s involve one of his greatest influences for a change. Kanye West. West is no-doubt a trailblazer in the rapper/producer lane he and Travis Scott embody, as are artists like Dr. Dre, Eminem, Pharrell Williams, even El-P. The difference is this: nobody but West has touched a sound like this at this level of popularity. In 2013, as he was approaching what to this point has been his peak, West released Yeezus . Many consider this industrial hip-hop concept album to be West’s masterpiece. It set new standards across hip-hop for not only what an artist could attempt to do musically, but what they ought to attempt musically. We don’t get albums like Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer winning album DAMN. or Tyler The Creator’s Grammy winning album IGOR without Yeezus . I won’t pretend UTOPIA is on that level, but the musical similarities are uncanny at times; Scott was definitely channeling Kanye West’s 2013 self this year. Industrial is the key word in this comparison. Not only do both artists have a command of the music industry itself on these projects, they feel sonically like they’ve been pulled into a machine. Their gritty metallic feel is relentless throughout both projects, and while both albums tend to keep the listener on edge, their sounds are captivating. Given, there are stylistic differences between the two, as there would be with any two mammoth producers. West will never hit a triple beat switch and Scott will never sample something the way West does Nina Simone on “Blood On The Leaves” . In fact sample work is one of the biggest differentiators between the two. West often uses them for color or as an aid to the chorus, where Scott bakes them into the beat more often, especially on UTOPIA. However, on Yeezus we see West utilize samples more similar to Scott. “Sen d It Up” is one of the more underrated songs on Yeezus and it happens to be a great example. The siren that sounds and then loops becomes the basis for the entire beat as the drum machine adds rhythm and the bass supports it on alternating beats. The vocal sinks into the middle of the mix, which is unusual on Yeezus where the vocals are usually prioritized in the mix. “SIRENS” does a similar thing and perfectly encapsulates UTOPIA ’s sweetspot. The similarities don’t stop there. From Justin Vernon’s presence on both projects to the drums on “CIRCUS MAXIMUS” and “Black Skinhead” the influence is clear and the overlap is real. Listen to Travis Scott’s “Coffee Bean” and compare it to “SIRENS” or Kanye West’s “All Falls Down” and compare it to “Hold My Liquor” . Both artists were out of their prior comfort zones, and both artists overlap in the same uncharted territory ten years apart. Admittedly, Kanye West’s highpoints on Yeezus are borderline unmatched, but that’s due for the most part to the pure size of his sound. It’s just bigger, and therefore less polished at times. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to say Scott’s new project is the cleaner of the two. Is it better? No, but I believe it scratches an itch that Yeezus can’t, and vice versa. Kanye West walked so Travis Scott could draft in his wake and eventually run next to him. UTOPIA is that side-by-side moment. When you think of Travis Scott, there’s one other name that always comes to mind. A man who, if he’s not featured on a Scott project, leaves a gaping hole that no artist can fill. That man, of course, is Dave Chapelle. Not. I wasn’t sure what to think seeing Chapelle’s name on the feature list but I didn’t expect “PARASAIL” . A song which features Yung Lean as well. This seems like a disastrous musical combo, yet somehow Scott pulled it together into something. That thing is closer to an interlude than anything else, but it's something. Chapelle speaks of the ups and downs of fame through a murky vocal filter, and Scott and Yung Lean follow with some autotuned babbling. It’s a nice break in the sonic intensity of the last few songs and simultaneously one of the most obviously on-topic songs of the whole project. In short, track 13 is a nice touch. From the shortest to the longest track, “SKITZO” is a production clinic. Scott perfectly sets the stage for Young Thug, before taking track 14 to another level. Its twists and turns account for a little over six minutes of music, which isn't for every mood. However, in this context I think it works, and I wouldn’t be surprised to have Travis Scott fans highlight this as one of the more important tracks on UTOPIA a few years down the line. I’ll tell you why shortly. THE BEAT SWITCH On an album where Scott shied away from central elements of his previous projects, one signature tool was still present. The beat switch may be Scott’s most easily recognizable contribution to the modern rap scene. A strategy popularized by his 2018 smash hit album, ASTROWORLD , the beat switch allows an artist to change the pace, focus, and sound of the song seamlessly when executed properly. It seems like following his success everyone needed a beat switch, from Drake to Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem. “On My Dis Side” and “SICKO MODE” are both legendary examples of Scott’s ability to execute his patented beat switches, and he added to that list this year. “MY EYES” is one of the more mellow tracks to begin with, featuring a garbled pre-chorus and stripped down instrumental. It’s touching in a way, leaning into the emotional ambience you might find on a Frank Ocean or James Blake track, but then the beat switch hits. Scott starts to pipe in filler sound in order to build the drums on the bottom of the mix. Then as the song reaches its decibel high-point he jumps in with a rap verse. The verse breaks a flow that could have become sleepy if it continued too long and raises the energy without changing the vibe of the song. Perfect execution. “MELTDOWN” provides another version of Scott’s signature strategy. Drake mentions right off the bat that tensions are rising; he’s right. The track is tightly wound and Drake’s whispered delivery adds to that effect until the second his verse ends and Scott pipes in the horns. The tension in the beat doesn’t release as the drums and baseline remain the same, but over the course of his verse Scott subtly switches the horns to the primary loop of the beat. Then he hits a full switch at the 2:30 mark. Leading himself in with the chorus, Scott jumps into his second straight verse, which escorts the listener straight through the end of one of UTOPIA ’s strongest tracks. I was thrilled to see Young Thug featured on "SKITZO". Scott set Thug up perfectly for his verse, although he should've cut his own first verse. On the positive side of things, the first beat switch provides a fairly seamless transition out of a potentially repetitive groove and bridges the second beat switch. The second switch is a more traditional Travis Scott beat switch, breaking down the beat and rebuilding it right in your ear. While Scott’s third verse isn’t much of a change of pace vocally, it moves along nicely into the third beat switch where he does provide some vocal diversity at the drop of a pin. The Joey Bada$$ style finish to “SKITZO” left me looking back to the Young Thug start. Of course I wish it was one verse shorter, but Scott’s ability to navigate between two dissimilar sides of the modern rap spectrum through a series of well-executed switches is unmatched. Travis Scott didn’t invent the beat switch, but he’s perfected it. Now for one of my proudest music listening moments of the year, “LOST FOREVER” . As track 15 rolled around, Scott pulled out a classic soul sample. This isn’t really his specialty, but the Chuck Senrick sample is executed well. After introducing the sample, he begins to build the beat, and something about the beat made me think ‘I want to hear Westside Gunn on this’. Then there he was! Clearly Scott did a great job of setting the stage for Gunn, and he delivered on the feature. It’s just a solid Pray for Paris type of song, but hearing it in slot 15 of UTOPIA really set me off (the only note I wrote was YES). “LOOOVE” is one of the most entertaining performances from Scott on the whole album. The beat is in your face, or ear, immediately and so is Travis Scott. He lays down the hook right away, then uses it to roll into his first verse before cutting the beat in favor of a weird noise break (I don’t know what else to call it). When he reintroduces the beat it’s a more tame version. It’s more listenable but because of the full restart it starts to feel a little long by the time it gets to the Kid Cudi feature. The feature is nice, but I was already moving on by the time it came. Now comes “K-POP” . Bad Bunny is the biggest artist in the world, and I get it. He’s palatable to different audiences, he’s an interesting performer, he seems to be a nice young man, but frankly his music is just fine to me. He is the benefactor (or victim) of mass appeal which locks him in a certain lane that scratches no particular itch of mine. He is better than other artists who fall into that category, but his feature doesn’t excite me. “K-POP”, despite a second solid performance from The Weeknd, slots right in with nearly any other Bad Bunny song. It’s fine. “TELEKINESIS” is essentially the US hip hop/r&b version of its predecessor. Future is another one of those sonically inoffensive artists that gets by formulaically. While I prefer his best songs to Bad Bunny, this song falls shorter than his. The SZA feature at the tail end is a nice touch, but if you spray the bathroom with Febreze and don’t flush, you aren’t really solving the problem. THE COMPLAINTS This has been an almost entirely positive review because I really enjoyed the album and am pleased with the result. However, because I have a holistically pessimistic outlook on the world, I have to interject with some negativity. This seems like as good a place as any. First, as someone who clearly put a lot of thought into album curation, why are Travis Scott’s transitions occasionally awful? A loosely themed album like UTOPIA doesn’t necessarily have to flow perfectly, but the transitions between 2 and 3, 3 and 4, and 11 and 12 are completely disjointed. I could go on but I’ll keep it simple: it’s baffling. Second, Scott does a fantastic job of feature placement for most of the album, until he doesn’t. The features from Teezo Touchdown , Drake, Beyonce, Young Thug, Westside Gunn, 21 Savage, and of course James Blake are all placed perfectly. However, on tracks 16-18 it falls apart. Kid Cudi is always welcome, and Scott does cater his vocal performance towards Cudi, but realistically his verse could have been any rapper. “LOOOVE” was not constructed in a way that Cudi’s price tag could justify anything he might add. I would rather have seen that go towards a feature on “I KNOW?”. Don Toliver would’ve been perfect. “LOOOVE” is immediately followed by “K-POP”. ‘Bad Bunny and The Weeknd on the same song, that’s the biggest artist in the world and one of the biggest in the US, it’ll be a smash hit!’. That’s exactly, to the word, what Travis Scott said (in my head) when his label superiors handed him those features to work with. Track 17 feels inorganic and off theme. It’s a fine song, but, with two artists of that caliber and level of popularity, “K-POP” couldn’t have been bad. At the end of the day, the box is checked and as listeners we can move on without much thought. Then, there’s the crime that’s “TELEKINESIS”. Future is a fine rapper. He has a generally leisurely autotune-heavy delivery which contrasts perfectly with his lyrical messages. This delivery works very well in certain settings, particularly when the beat forms a perfect pocket for him to sit in. If that doesn’t make sense listen to “The Percocet & Stripper Joint” (fun name) or “Colossal” . Both great examples of him riding a beat to its completion, which is why he works well with a producer like Zaytoven. However, when he doesn’t have one of those comfortable pockets he accounts for some of the most boring, uninspiring, middling rap music known to the mainstream, and it’s well known. Travis Scott knows how known Future is, and he knows that a good way to get an audience through the 18th song of a 19 song album is to plug him and SZA back there. Mr. Scott, you're absolutely correct in this assumption; but, as a friend, next time you want to throw SZA (who kills every feature) on a song for streams, please don’t make it such a boring one. That’s all. “TILL FURTHER NOTICE” is a great title for what could be Travis Scott’s last song on a solo rap album. It certainly left a good taste in my mouth, which is the key for a song like this. 21 Savage lays down his second great feature of the album, better than the first, and James Blake’s feature is a great touch. Blake is probably my favorite Travis Scott collaborator. His production credits tend to pop up on great Scott songs and they feature nicely on one another's projects. “STOP TRYING TO BE GOD” and “Mile High” are great songs. Basically, he’s a great person to help usher out this era of Travis Scott. Scott’s last verse is nothing crazy, but like most of his Utopian performances, it’s solid. It makes me want more, but simultaneously leaves me excited for his next step; to me that’s a great finish. If you’re not tired of me yet, let me wrap things up for you. Travis Scott’s 2023 release was one of the most anticipated albums of the year, and one of the most anticipated rap albums of the last three years. I think he safely slots into a category occupied by artists like Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, and Drake. Looking at the releases from these artists the last three years, Donda and Donda 2 , Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers , The Offseason , and Certified Lover Boy , Honestly Nevermind , and Her Loss respectively, I think UTOPIA is the strongest. Scott continued to take steps forward, with the awareness that he didn’t need to part with his comfort zone. Does he have the lyrical and thematic focus of Lamar or Cole? No. Does he have the industry firepower of West? Not quite. Does he have the rabid audience of Drake? No. But he has enough of all three and more, and that places him atop these albums. UTOPIA is an album that simultaneously thrives in consistency and diversity. This is a formula that serves the greatest musical acts of all time, from The Rolling Stones to D’Angelo. All I’m saying is Scott is on the right track. It’s not ground-breaking, it may not be a top album of the year, it probably isn’t his best, but it's solid. I’d encourage anyone to give it a listen, unless you want 19 songs worth of Dave Chapelle. There’s only one on this album. UTOPIA is a 7.5/10

UTOPI A 8/4/2023 On July 28, 2023, Travis Scott released his fourth solo album, UTOPIA . Finally. Travis Scott is one of the most prolific production-focused rappers of all time, and one of the most important figures in the music industry today. From his instant classic albums Rodeo and ASTROWORLD to his various chart-topping singles, he’s had a serious impact on the mainstream of rap, at points rising to heights of popularity no rapper has seen since Kanye West’s prime. His impact stretches beyond numbers and popularity too. His songwriting and production skills have been an asset to many studios, but most importantly, his musical versatility and range of influences have played a huge role in bridging the gap between production giants like West and Metro Boomin. Scott is an industry fixture, but it’s been a minute since we’ve heard that signature style of his. It’s no secret that Travis Scott needed some time away following the tragic events of the Astroworld Festival. He found himself in the center of a unique kind of controversy, one that no doubt weighs on him as heavy as nearly anyone else. As a fan it's a hard thing to navigate, and as the artist himself I’d imagine it's nearly impossible. That did concern me for several reasons. Scott thrives when he’s smack in the middle of the industry action. ASTROWORLD is one of the most successful pop/rap albums ever, and a big reason for that is the timing. Scott nailed the sound of the time, brought in the right features, and added his unique set of tools. It simply wouldn’t have been possible if he wasn’t so ‘in the know’. So, naturally, I was concerned he couldn’t replicate it while avoiding the spotlight (not that a man of Scott’s popularity and associations could ever disappear completely). Fortunately, Scott answered many of my lingering questions when the extensive UTOPIA rollout began. A rollout which, by the way, got on my nerves just a bit. Just give me the music Travis. But, I have to admit his strategy paid off. Instead of attempting to capture pop and rap in a bottle once again, Scott moved out of Astroworld and built a new one: UTOPIA. Travis Scott chose to begin his 2023 release with “HYAENA” . The energy, pace, and atmosphere do a good job of introducing UTOPIA . It’s just hectic enough to engage the listener but not so much that it loses them off the bat. Track 2 continues to settle into the same vibe. “THANK GOD” , while it isn’t one of the strongest songs on the album, does its job. To me, it takes too long to catch its groove, and although it does to an extent in the end, I don’t think it works outside of this chronological context. Speaking of context, “MODERN JAM” isn’t concerned with that. It’s a fun song, Teezo Touchdown is good for that, and it feels like Scott had fun making it. To be clear, the general sound is the same, as is much of this sonically coordinated album. It’s just the pace, intention, and vibe that are responsible for the shock. Maybe shock is what Travis Scott wanted here. The beat walks along nicely and the vocal effects are great. This definitely feels like the first song Scott wants his listeners to bring out of UTOPIA and into their playlists. In another somewhat jarring transition, Scott follows track 3 with “MY EYES” . An immediately different feel, this song is Scott’s best since ASTROWORLD . It resides within the sound of the album but executes something completely different. A spacey synth sits on top of a mild drum and bassline, as a muddied Justin Vernon vocal guides track 4 into its first verse. Scott drops in a pretty average verse, but pitches and tunes his vocal to the point that it's just another tool painting the ambient soundscape. The chorus hits and Vernon chimes in for another line as the beat begins to switch. Travis Scott’s first beat switch of the album is perfectly executed. A new faded sample sits over the top and the ambience grows louder, as does the new drum and bass fueled low end. Scott’s second verse sinks into the middle of the mix, allowing the beat to rock and the pace to catch on completely, leading perfectly into track 5. This is the epitome of what Travis Scott has given himself the opportunity to do from a production standpoint on UTOPIA . It’s the Utopian sound. THE LOW-END If you followed the UTOPIA rollout as closely as I did, you’d be very interested to hear how it sounds. You’d also be relieved to find that it does have a distinct sound. However, I think calling it the ‘Utopian’ sound is counterintuitive in a sense. This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy it, but the implication is that this is Travis Scott’s musical sweetspot, his Utopia. One he could settle down in forever. I disagree. While it is certainly a strong and polished mix of his catalog’s strongest sounds and influences, this is just one stop on the road. But, it’s an interesting stop so let’s go deeper. The key to this sound, as far as I can track it, comes down to the low-end. ASTROWORLD ’s strength was in the airiness of the production; UTOPIA has none of that. Its grimy industrial feel is the product of diluted soundbites, endless layering, and prominent drums that come together in an organized clutter, and it feeds into one of Scott’s biggest influences (keep reading for more on that, sucker). The only reason these moving parts are able to combine so cohesively is because the low-end is there to center the listener. “SIRENS” is a great example. The beat builds on a rising sample of New England’s “Explorer Suite” and a blown out sample of Amanaz’s “Nsunka Lwendo” . The drums rise to the top of the sound, leaving just the bass on the bottom. With all the sound swirling atop the vocals, the listener could easily get swept up and taken out of the groove at the hands of audible chaos, but because of the strong baseline, the ear has something to return to. The bass is primarily looped underneath, and its consistent presence subtly holds the listeners ear down just enough to keep them on rhythm. It works, as does the Utopian sound. Moving chronologically, Track 5 is another one of those album-worthy songs that may not stand up outside this context. I like “GOD'S COUNTRY” , even though it isn’t a Blake Shelton cover. It ups the energy a bit coming out of “MY EYES” and leads nicely into “SIRENS”. “SIRENS” is a bit of a new look for Scott. Working with dual samples, the disjointed sample-work comes together into a beat that is plausibly within his reach but not something we’d heard prior to UTOPIA. Scott’s performance is alright for what it is. On a song like this, he just needed to keep up, lyrics go by the wayside. In many ways this is what Lil Uzi Vert was trying to accomplish on their last album. They should’ve spent some more time with Travis Scott. Back on topic, “SIRENS” finishes with a fun little skit in which Travis Scott declares his hotel room Utopia; I guess it had nothing to do with music after all. Drake time! I have never been more excited to hear Drake than when he spoke his first line on “MELTDOWN” . It must be because his and Scott’s previous collaborations include “SICKO MODE” and “Bubbly” . Immediately I am hoping for a chart-topping track 7 complete with fun verses and a beat switch. I’ll have to check back on the charts in a week, but my wishlist was otherwise covered. Drake delivers my favorite verse of his in a long while. Firing shot after shot in a voice just above a whisper, he made his mark. Travis Scott matches him, grinding along with a simple but polished trap beat. Scott uses the hook to switch up the beat a couple times and his verses keep the energy going. It’s a good sign when the artist has complete control over their audience, and Scott has claimed it at this point in the album, as track 8 rolls in. “FE!N” gives the listener no time to recover from “MELTDOWN”. The high-octane Playboi Carti feature sparks the fire that the bass-boosted beat continues to fuel. His impact is so big that it’s hard to tell it’s a Travis Scott song, in a good way. “DELRESTO (ECHOES)” is a similar situation. Travis Scott does such a great job of fusing UTOPIA and Beyonce’s RENAISSANCE , it’s hard to tell whose album this is. Scott's verse follows a classic Beyonce opening verse. He holds his own, singing the first part then rapping for the remainder of what feels more like a Travis Scott feature on a Beyonce song. If you liked Beyonce’s 2022 project, this may likely be your favorite song on UTOPIA, and the way Justin Vernon finishes it off, I couldn’t blame you one bit. THE CHAMELEON There’s a rumor that UTOPIA will be the last solo rap project Travis Scott releases. This means, supposedly, that he will turn to straight production. Naturally, upon hearing this my gut reaction was disappointment. However, as I listened to this record with that in the back of my mind, disappointment turned to excitement. This is partially because the idea of his production skills showing up more often on other artists’ projects is extremely enticing, but even more so because Travis Scott is a chameleon. UTOPIA , despite its generally laser focused soundscape and consistent stylistic choices, displays a great deal of diversity in Scott’s performances to go with subtle shifts in the production. Scott is not the most technically strong rapper, but he knows that. That’s why he often leans into his signature delivery: autotune supported by adlibs (though he shows it less on this record). However, he also has a keen awareness that this doesn’t fit every musical scenario he whips up. That’s when he, especially on this record, begins to utilize his influences. Kanye’s influence is forefront in lot’s of Scott’s rapping, but he showed more on this record. I heard Joey Bada$$'s (or is it Bada$$'$) influence down the stretch of “SKITZO” and on “LOOOVE” Scott’s performance skews towards Kid Cudi who is featured on the song. “I KNOW?” is the best example. This is the closest to an ASTROWORLD song we get on this album. It has more air in the production than the rest of the album. This calls for a more filling vocal performance, which usually results in features. Scott decides to go for no features and delivers my favorite performance of his on the album. The chorus, which provides just the right amount of breathing room for this kind of uninterrupted beat, is a page straight from Drake’s book. It sets him up for his signature delivery on the first verse, but knowing 3:30 of this can get repetitive, he switches his delivery again. For the second verse he taps into The Migos’ book, flipping back and forth between bubbly autotune and a more restrained untouched vocal painted with adlibs. He even throws in some whispered adlibs for the length of the song reminiscent of Kendrick on Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers . It’s one of the strongest songs on the album, and although it seems like it was by committee, it’s all just Travis Scott. Scott’s ability to shift around vocally not only allows him to create a more interesting solo album, theoretically, it could help him slot into more diverse features. This would be a great tool for any of his future projects as a producer who might feature on his own beats. Which reminds me, his chameleon in ability is not limited to rapping. Scott did a great job on UTOPIA of creating different sounds within his own, depending on who he had in the studio. From his NYC hardcore style sample-work on “LOST FOREVER” with the help of The Alchemist, to the perfect RENAISSANCE impression on “DELRESTO (ECHOES)”, Scott has an ability to accommodate any artist he might want to. It’s notable to say the least. Track 10, “I KNOW?” , is the second Drake feature on the album. Oh, I’m sorry, that’s just Travis Scott singing the chorus. Beyond Scott’s vocal shapeshifting, what caught my eye here is the adlibs. Scott seems to have decided to shy away from his signature autotuned-adlib delivery until “I KNOW?”. Something I didn’t see coming, and although I have no issues with his vocal deliveries in general on this album, when he executes like he does on this song his verses never fall flat. There are lots of ways to deliver energy in a rap verse, this is just Travis Scott’s most consistent shot in my opinion. Travis Scott knows how to make a really catchy song for most hip-hop audiences. Track 11 covers another audience. This is my first intentional experience with Rob49, and he brings a certain energy to the beginning of “TOPIA TWINS” . I was questioning the direction of the song when Rob49 jumped in how he did. I liked it, but there was no verse even close to that direction on UTOPIA to that point. I should’ve known 21 Savage could match it. 21 is one of the best feature rappers ever and this is no exception. He steps into the beat perfectly, bridging the admittedly different energies presented by Travis Scott and Rob49, and making “TOPIA TWINS” the fifth straight stand-alone song. Before I even get into “CIRCUS MAXIMUS” , I’ll say this makes six. I like The Weeknd and what he brings to the music industry, but when I saw his name I rolled my eyes. Scott did a really tasteful job of incorporating different sounds into his without departing what makes this album itself to this point, but I figured this was the end. The Weeknd’s sound, at its best, is ultra clean and lives in the high end of the mix. His Canadian vocals soar on top of well produced pop/r&b instrumentals. In his early days he showed the ability to touch on hip-hop, on House of Balloons especially, but that was a long time ago and he hasn’t been back there in his current form. Of course, Travis Scott pulled him right back. Swae Lee leads into track 12 nicely, and rising synths sit on top of the drums as Scott’s middling verse serves to build tension, accompanied by some background screaming. Then one of the purest voices in music today cuts in. The Weeknd provides a temporary release in tension, but the beat revamps and continues to build. The ultimate result is one of the most epic sounds on the album, and another success for Scott. In most cases on this album Scott’s ability to seamlessly accommodate an artist is what makes the song; here it’s The Weeknd’s ability to adapt, despite having an unbeatable formula within his solo work. Hats off to both artists, and Swae Lee too I suppose. THE YEEZUS EFFECT I’m tired of comparing UTOPIA to Travis Scott’s previous albums. Let’s involve one of his greatest influences for a change. Kanye West. West is no-doubt a trailblazer in the rapper/producer lane he and Travis Scott embody, as are artists like Dr. Dre, Eminem, Pharrell Williams, even El-P. The difference is this: nobody but West has touched a sound like this at this level of popularity. In 2013, as he was approaching what to this point has been his peak, West released Yeezus . Many consider this industrial hip-hop concept album to be West’s masterpiece. It set new standards across hip-hop for not only what an artist could attempt to do musically, but what they ought to attempt musically. We don’t get albums like Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer winning album DAMN. or Tyler The Creator’s Grammy winning album IGOR without Yeezus . I won’t pretend UTOPIA is on that level, but the musical similarities are uncanny at times; Scott was definitely channeling Kanye West’s 2013 self this year. Industrial is the key word in this comparison. Not only do both artists have a command of the music industry itself on these projects, they feel sonically like they’ve been pulled into a machine. Their gritty metallic feel is relentless throughout both projects, and while both albums tend to keep the listener on edge, their sounds are captivating. Given, there are stylistic differences between the two, as there would be with any two mammoth producers. West will never hit a triple beat switch and Scott will never sample something the way West does Nina Simone on “Blood On The Leaves” . In fact sample work is one of the biggest differentiators between the two. West often uses them for color or as an aid to the chorus, where Scott bakes them into the beat more often, especially on UTOPIA. However, on Yeezus we see West utilize samples more similar to Scott. “Sen d It Up” is one of the more underrated songs on Yeezus and it happens to be a great example. The siren that sounds and then loops becomes the basis for the entire beat as the drum machine adds rhythm and the bass supports it on alternating beats. The vocal sinks into the middle of the mix, which is unusual on Yeezus where the vocals are usually prioritized in the mix. “SIRENS” does a similar thing and perfectly encapsulates UTOPIA ’s sweetspot. The similarities don’t stop there. From Justin Vernon’s presence on both projects to the drums on “CIRCUS MAXIMUS” and “Black Skinhead” the influence is clear and the overlap is real. Listen to Travis Scott’s “Coffee Bean” and compare it to “SIRENS” or Kanye West’s “All Falls Down” and compare it to “Hold My Liquor” . Both artists were out of their prior comfort zones, and both artists overlap in the same uncharted territory ten years apart. Admittedly, Kanye West’s highpoints on Yeezus are borderline unmatched, but that’s due for the most part to the pure size of his sound. It’s just bigger, and therefore less polished at times. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to say Scott’s new project is the cleaner of the two. Is it better? No, but I believe it scratches an itch that Yeezus can’t, and vice versa. Kanye West walked so Travis Scott could draft in his wake and eventually run next to him. UTOPIA is that side-by-side moment. When you think of Travis Scott, there’s one other name that always comes to mind. A man who, if he’s not featured on a Scott project, leaves a gaping hole that no artist can fill. That man, of course, is Dave Chapelle. Not. I wasn’t sure what to think seeing Chapelle’s name on the feature list but I didn’t expect “PARASAIL” . A song which features Yung Lean as well. This seems like a disastrous musical combo, yet somehow Scott pulled it together into something. That thing is closer to an interlude than anything else, but it's something. Chapelle speaks of the ups and downs of fame through a murky vocal filter, and Scott and Yung Lean follow with some autotuned babbling. It’s a nice break in the sonic intensity of the last few songs and simultaneously one of the most obviously on-topic songs of the whole project. In short, track 13 is a nice touch. From the shortest to the longest track, “SKITZO” is a production clinic. Scott perfectly sets the stage for Young Thug, before taking track 14 to another level. Its twists and turns account for a little over six minutes of music, which isn't for every mood. However, in this context I think it works, and I wouldn’t be surprised to have Travis Scott fans highlight this as one of the more important tracks on UTOPIA a few years down the line. I’ll tell you why shortly. THE BEAT SWITCH On an album where Scott shied away from central elements of his previous projects, one signature tool was still present. The beat switch may be Scott’s most easily recognizable contribution to the modern rap scene. A strategy popularized by his 2018 smash hit album, ASTROWORLD , the beat switch allows an artist to change the pace, focus, and sound of the song seamlessly when executed properly. It seems like following his success everyone needed a beat switch, from Drake to Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem. “On My Dis Side” and “SICKO MODE” are both legendary examples of Scott’s ability to execute his patented beat switches, and he added to that list this year. “MY EYES” is one of the more mellow tracks to begin with, featuring a garbled pre-chorus and stripped down instrumental. It’s touching in a way, leaning into the emotional ambience you might find on a Frank Ocean or James Blake track, but then the beat switch hits. Scott starts to pipe in filler sound in order to build the drums on the bottom of the mix. Then as the song reaches its decibel high-point he jumps in with a rap verse. The verse breaks a flow that could have become sleepy if it continued too long and raises the energy without changing the vibe of the song. Perfect execution. “MELTDOWN” provides another version of Scott’s signature strategy. Drake mentions right off the bat that tensions are rising; he’s right. The track is tightly wound and Drake’s whispered delivery adds to that effect until the second his verse ends and Scott pipes in the horns. The tension in the beat doesn’t release as the drums and baseline remain the same, but over the course of his verse Scott subtly switches the horns to the primary loop of the beat. Then he hits a full switch at the 2:30 mark. Leading himself in with the chorus, Scott jumps into his second straight verse, which escorts the listener straight through the end of one of UTOPIA ’s strongest tracks. I was thrilled to see Young Thug featured on "SKITZO". Scott set Thug up perfectly for his verse, although he should've cut his own first verse. On the positive side of things, the first beat switch provides a fairly seamless transition out of a potentially repetitive groove and bridges the second beat switch. The second switch is a more traditional Travis Scott beat switch, breaking down the beat and rebuilding it right in your ear. While Scott’s third verse isn’t much of a change of pace vocally, it moves along nicely into the third beat switch where he does provide some vocal diversity at the drop of a pin. The Joey Bada$$ style finish to “SKITZO” left me looking back to the Young Thug start. Of course I wish it was one verse shorter, but Scott’s ability to navigate between two dissimilar sides of the modern rap spectrum through a series of well-executed switches is unmatched. Travis Scott didn’t invent the beat switch, but he’s perfected it. Now for one of my proudest music listening moments of the year, “LOST FOREVER” . As track 15 rolled around, Scott pulled out a classic soul sample. This isn’t really his specialty, but the Chuck Senrick sample is executed well. After introducing the sample, he begins to build the beat, and something about the beat made me think ‘I want to hear Westside Gunn on this’. Then there he was! Clearly Scott did a great job of setting the stage for Gunn, and he delivered on the feature. It’s just a solid Pray for Paris type of song, but hearing it in slot 15 of UTOPIA really set me off (the only note I wrote was YES). “LOOOVE” is one of the most entertaining performances from Scott on the whole album. The beat is in your face, or ear, immediately and so is Travis Scott. He lays down the hook right away, then uses it to roll into his first verse before cutting the beat in favor of a weird noise break (I don’t know what else to call it). When he reintroduces the beat it’s a more tame version. It’s more listenable but because of the full restart it starts to feel a little long by the time it gets to the Kid Cudi feature. The feature is nice, but I was already moving on by the time it came. Now comes “K-POP” . Bad Bunny is the biggest artist in the world, and I get it. He’s palatable to different audiences, he’s an interesting performer, he seems to be a nice young man, but frankly his music is just fine to me. He is the benefactor (or victim) of mass appeal which locks him in a certain lane that scratches no particular itch of mine. He is better than other artists who fall into that category, but his feature doesn’t excite me. “K-POP”, despite a second solid performance from The Weeknd, slots right in with nearly any other Bad Bunny song. It’s fine. “TELEKINESIS” is essentially the US hip hop/r&b version of its predecessor. Future is another one of those sonically inoffensive artists that gets by formulaically. While I prefer his best songs to Bad Bunny, this song falls shorter than his. The SZA feature at the tail end is a nice touch, but if you spray the bathroom with Febreze and don’t flush, you aren’t really solving the problem. THE COMPLAINTS This has been an almost entirely positive review because I really enjoyed the album and am pleased with the result. However, because I have a holistically pessimistic outlook on the world, I have to interject with some negativity. This seems like as good a place as any. First, as someone who clearly put a lot of thought into album curation, why are Travis Scott’s transitions occasionally awful? A loosely themed album like UTOPIA doesn’t necessarily have to flow perfectly, but the transitions between 2 and 3, 3 and 4, and 11 and 12 are completely disjointed. I could go on but I’ll keep it simple: it’s baffling. Second, Scott does a fantastic job of feature placement for most of the album, until he doesn’t. The features from Teezo Touchdown , Drake, Beyonce, Young Thug, Westside Gunn, 21 Savage, and of course James Blake are all placed perfectly. However, on tracks 16-18 it falls apart. Kid Cudi is always welcome, and Scott does cater his vocal performance towards Cudi, but realistically his verse could have been any rapper. “LOOOVE” was not constructed in a way that Cudi’s price tag could justify anything he might add. I would rather have seen that go towards a feature on “I KNOW?”. Don Toliver would’ve been perfect. “LOOOVE” is immediately followed by “K-POP”. ‘Bad Bunny and The Weeknd on the same song, that’s the biggest artist in the world and one of the biggest in the US, it’ll be a smash hit!’. That’s exactly, to the word, what Travis Scott said (in my head) when his label superiors handed him those features to work with. Track 17 feels inorganic and off theme. It’s a fine song, but, with two artists of that caliber and level of popularity, “K-POP” couldn’t have been bad. At the end of the day, the box is checked and as listeners we can move on without much thought. Then, there’s the crime that’s “TELEKINESIS”. Future is a fine rapper. He has a generally leisurely autotune-heavy delivery which contrasts perfectly with his lyrical messages. This delivery works very well in certain settings, particularly when the beat forms a perfect pocket for him to sit in. If that doesn’t make sense listen to “The Percocet & Stripper Joint” (fun name) or “Colossal” . Both great examples of him riding a beat to its completion, which is why he works well with a producer like Zaytoven. However, when he doesn’t have one of those comfortable pockets he accounts for some of the most boring, uninspiring, middling rap music known to the mainstream, and it’s well known. Travis Scott knows how known Future is, and he knows that a good way to get an audience through the 18th song of a 19 song album is to plug him and SZA back there. Mr. Scott, you're absolutely correct in this assumption; but, as a friend, next time you want to throw SZA (who kills every feature) on a song for streams, please don’t make it such a boring one. That’s all. “TILL FURTHER NOTICE” is a great title for what could be Travis Scott’s last song on a solo rap album. It certainly left a good taste in my mouth, which is the key for a song like this. 21 Savage lays down his second great feature of the album, better than the first, and James Blake’s feature is a great touch. Blake is probably my favorite Travis Scott collaborator. His production credits tend to pop up on great Scott songs and they feature nicely on one another's projects. “STOP TRYING TO BE GOD” and “Mile High” are great songs. Basically, he’s a great person to help usher out this era of Travis Scott. Scott’s last verse is nothing crazy, but like most of his Utopian performances, it’s solid. It makes me want more, but simultaneously leaves me excited for his next step; to me that’s a great finish. If you’re not tired of me yet, let me wrap things up for you. Travis Scott’s 2023 release was one of the most anticipated albums of the year, and one of the most anticipated rap albums of the last three years. I think he safely slots into a category occupied by artists like Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, and Drake. Looking at the releases from these artists the last three years, Donda and Donda 2 , Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers , The Offseason , and Certified Lover Boy , Honestly Nevermind , and Her Loss respectively, I think UTOPIA is the strongest. Scott continued to take steps forward, with the awareness that he didn’t need to part with his comfort zone. Does he have the lyrical and thematic focus of Lamar or Cole? No. Does he have the industry firepower of West? Not quite. Does he have the rabid audience of Drake? No. But he has enough of all three and more, and that places him atop these albums. UTOPIA is an album that simultaneously thrives in consistency and diversity. This is a formula that serves the greatest musical acts of all time, from The Rolling Stones to D’Angelo. All I’m saying is Scott is on the right track. It’s not ground-breaking, it may not be a top album of the year, it probably isn’t his best, but it's solid. I’d encourage anyone to give it a listen, unless you want 19 songs worth of Dave Chapelle. There’s only one on this album. UTOPIA is a 7.5/10

THE POP SHOP BY: Ian Sherry 9/5/2023 If you came for Faygo I apologize. In the grand scheme of music creation and consumption, genres are completely trivial. However, they are one of my favorite things to noodle around. The most noodley of the bunch is pop. As music continually evolves, defining pop gets increasingly difficult. Michael Jackson is the ‘king of pop’, yet he falls under the same general mega-genre as Ethel Cain , The Beach Boys , and Shania Twain . Strange but true. The pop quandary is most evident, to me, in a record store. Most often, you’ll find a pop/rock section. Certainly that model was sensible at a time, especially in a stretch like the 80s through the 2010s. These days however, I’m not sure those two genres align as closely. With acts like Imagine Dragons and Fall Out Boy fading, the bridge between the two has narrowed in favor of the slow-motion collision of rap and pop. Therefore, everytime I see a pop/rock section, I’ve granted myself permission to chuckle at whatever dinosaur constructed it. As a freshman in college without a credit rating (or whatever you need to own a business), I have no chance of running a record shop anytime soon. Admittedly, my opinion is from the outside looking in, however my occasional frustration with genre organization is justified. So, because my writing this article is conveniently inconsequential, let’s organize my theoretical record shop: The Pop Shop. Here at the Pop Shop, we operate under the assumption that all of our customers are equally, if not more, opinionated as myself, especially regarding genre placement of their favorite artists. Now that I’m a shop owner, I suppose I’ll have to make compromises here and there to accommodate customers with diversified taste. As I touched on previously, pop is what holds most genres together. Pop is the key to a broad musical palette. Therefore as a record store owner with fairly diverse taste and an equally multi-interested customer base, my first order of business is to define pop. Is pop linear? Well, I’m not sure but I might be by the time this paragraph is done. My instinct is to say yes. One of my favorite music-listening activities is creating playlists that transverse eras. It’s very satisfying to look at dissimilar beginnings and endings to tracklists, wondering how they connect, and finding out somewhere in the middle. How did American popular music seamlessly evolve (or regress) from Frank Sinatra to Drake ? That’s an answer for another article, but it certainly did. The keyword to my previous claim is seamless. There is no definite instant in pop music history in which the definition itself suddenly changed. There have been game changing artists, releases, even songs, but mass artistic or stylistic change simply can’t happen over night. The result is a genre which is constantly mentioned but insufficiently defined. Concise or concrete definitions to abstract concepts are futile in nearly every case. That’s why I’m taking a whole article to unpack it, instead of a sign behind the Pop Shop’s front desk. So, after brief deliberation, pop is indeed linear. It’s not linear in a traditional sense though. It’s not a straight line. It’s a chain linked together by genre-bending or trailblazing artists. That chain looks drastically different at some points than others, but it’s all one piece. I’ll take it a step further: it's a gyre. Pop is a gyre If you don’t know what a gyre is, you haven’t explored our homepage enough. Go now . Welcome back. To summarize: a gyre is a linear pattern in which a vortex widens from a point until it reaches a breaking point of sorts, it then continues from a single point in the center of the widened end. The most important thing to understand about the pop gyre, is that it doesn’t stop at any point, which makes it linear, but it does have significant and traceable points of reshaping. These points are marked by collections of those aforementioned artists, projects, and songs. Whether it's Billie Holiday’s shedding the light of pop culture on the horrors of the south, the gay sensation that was Freddie Mercury , or one of David Bowie’s many genre-quaking phases, individual impacts on mainstream pop music have more significance in the real world than we could understand. That impact, if you want to fully understand pop, cannot be separated from the stylistic evolution of the genre. I have no problem with the general opinion that Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra are America’s first pop stars. That makes them ground zero for American music’s gyre. Highlighting an artist is a very useful tool for defining a genre, someone who encapsulates the sound and or attitude of a musical movement. Artists like The Beatles , David Bowie, Michael Jackson , Whitney Houston , Madonna , and Adele have all held that role. You’ll find all of those artists in the Pop Shop’s signature pop section. However, as they don’t currently define 2023’s pop sound, they can’t be at the center of our biggest section. We have to pick a new artist. 2023’s centerpiece of pop ‘Finally some specifics’, says any reader more interested in facts than conceptual rambling. 2023’s pop music landscape is broader than ever. As music continues to evolve, despite the gyre resets, the scale of pop will continue to broaden. That only makes sense. Generally, anything that charts on the billboard is somehow pop-adjacent. Nowadays that means pop directly overlaps with rap, r&b, country, indie, and rock, among others. When Kendrick Lamar was charting with To Pimp A Butterfly , pop had a link with jazz. When The Weeknd and Dua Lipa started stylistically dipping into 80s tropes, pop had a link to a different decade. When Lil Uzi Vert charted with “Just Wanna Rock” , pop had a link to New Jersey club. That’s all to say a diverse landscape makes it hard to pinpoint a centerpiece, but I have a pick: SZA . Although pop is the common ground for any mainstream genre, it always has a definable sound. This sound is constantly shifting, and with rap and r&b packing the charts, it has begun to shift that direction. The more palatable, even inoffensive, approach that a Taylor Swift or Harry Styles brings to the table is no longer the solution. The ideal pop star has to incorporate their own sound, have an interesting persona, a splash of sexuality, but most of all, the ability to collaborate. I don’t just mean Dua Lipa adding Dababy to her song that’s already charting, I mean real sound-altering collaboration. SZA has all of that. SZA has been a fixture in modern r&b since her hit album Ctrl , but her 2022 release SOS launched her into the center of today’s music scene. The hit single “Kill Bill”, which was accompanied by quite the music video, captured a huge audience. Her variety of moods accommodated brand new audiences. Her attitude and personality thrilled her long-time fans. And, her well-executed and occasionally unexpected features further proved her ability to bring together the best in music. Try “Kill Bill” , “Seek & Destroy” , “Snooze” , “Ghost in the Machine” , and “Open Arms” . Though it leans towards r&b, SOS embodies pop. It will be listened to, referenced, and imitated for the rest of this decade. So, when you enter the Pop Shop looking to buy SOS , check smack in the middle of the store. Nitpicking Now that we’ve established the center of pop, we have to do the dirty work: marking borders. I think the best course of action is one mega-pop section subdivided into the various genres of influence and today’s popular sound. The outer walls will be lined with the following non-pop-adjacent genres: blues, punk, metal, folk/bluegrass, hip-hop, soul, jazz, house/techno, reggae, and classical. The border of the mega-pop section will be made up of the following pop-adjacent genres: rock, r&b, rap, indie, country, and latin. Each of those will connect to the mega-pop section like this: genre/pop. Here’s two defining artists for each, but the Pop Shop has everything. rock/pop Elton John Portugal. The Man r&b/pop Whitney Houston Ella Mai rap/pop Nelly Doja Cat indie/pop The Smiths Wet Leg country/pop Dolly Parton Chris Stapleton latin/pop Selena ROSALIA Prince gets his own section. Isn’t this fun? Closing for the night I find it interesting that pop seems to glean a negative connotation. For example, if you tell someone their favorite Canadian rapper, who they might consider a hip-hop icon, is more of a pop artist, they might take offense. In fact, I’ve found it's a good way to immediately turn a conversation into a confrontation. Try it some time. Then, remind them of that elite crop I just listed. Remind them that pop is the confluence of everything that is hot in music today. Remind them that it's a perfect gauge of just how much this divided country has in common. Remind them that ultimately genre has no relation to merit. If they’re still stuck on their anti-pop attitude, send them to my shop. I’ll be waiting.

Tabs On Tigers: Atop The American 5/9/2025 BY: IAN SHERRY On May 2, 2025, the Tigers released Kenta Maeda. The Tigers are the best team in the American League, and they are beginning to act like it. Tabs On Tigers Vol. 3 For a long time, I’ve dreamt that the Tigers would see success with rising prospects and, with the intention of taking themselves seriously, cut Javier Baez to free themselves of his $28 million-mid-career crisis and a roster spot. This is that moment. However, in the undeniably turbulent developments of the last year-plus, it was the Japanese legend Kenta Maeda’s $14 million contract that needed to be shed. Meanwhile, Javier Baez is, for the moment, the Detroit Tigers’ everyday centerfielder. The former all-star shortstop’s infamous struggles at the plate lost him his position to Dodgers’ system acquisition and frequenter of Anaheim’s short porch Trey Sweeney. Forced into a utility role, Baez took on the role enthusiastically, according to manager AJ Hinch on 97.1 FM’s pregame AJ Hinch Show. In that same interview, Hinch added that he’d continue to play Baez because “he’s a winning player” – a compliment that resonated with me. Weeks later, Hinch remained true to that insistence, and Baez has responded accordingly. On top of playing a smooth, instinctive center field Javy is looking like himself consistently at the plate. The hitter that can adjust to pitches and drive balls, who’s only shown up in flashes for Detroit, mostly with runners in scoring position, is showing up on a more consistent basis this season. He’s bumped his average to a perfect .313 over the recent Tigers offensive explosions and is sitting at a 1.6 WAR. In other words, he’s a winning player. As for those prospects, one in particular is starting to act his age. Spencer Torkelson looked like a new man in Spring Training. His stance is more athletic and upright, centered on his right leg. So far, the adjustments he’s retained have allowed for a simpler path to the ball, most notable in his compact homerun swings, of which he’s already had 10 (2 shy of Judge and Raleigh for the most in the AL). Torkelson’s .254 batting average is encouraging, though it fluctuates, and the theoretical benefits of power hitter status may lead to more on-base appearances anyhow. Tork’s success has complicated life for sophomore Colt Keith. His rookie season was ultimately a success at the plate after a slow start, which he’s mirrored so far this season. However, the ball is starting to leave the ballpark for the Tigers system product (and I don’t want to hear about the ‘Coors effect’ because 450 ft is 450 ft). Still sitting at just a .207 AVG and 4 homers, Keith is tasked with recreating last season’s offensive ramp-up while establishing himself in the field (the DH position has Kerry Carpenter’s name written all over it for the foreseeable future). One more Tiger prospect has made pleasantly surprising strides on both sides of the ball. With the injury to starting catcher Jake Rogers, Dillon Dingler was pushed into the everyday starting lineup, and he’s proved ready for the moment. So far, Dingler is batting .290, which is second best among catchers. A strong-hitting catcher in an age where putrid offense is tolerated at the defensive-minded position is no small advantage. Dingler is an athletic young player with a great arm, room to improve behind the plate, and the ability to whack the ball out of the park – who wouldn’t like to imagine a long career for him as Detroit’s backstop? Injury Update I imagined Parker Meadows (nerve) might return early in the year, but that proved a pipe dream when the Tigers signed Manuel Margot to a one-year deal. Since then, Meadows was placed on the 60-Day IL and Margot himself went to the 10-day with a knee injury from which he’s rehabbing now. In good news, Matt Vierling (shoulder) homered in a Toledo win on May 6th in his rehab assignment. Things have been quiet regarding Alex Cobb (back) lately, but he tracks to be rehabbing soon assuming no hangups. Jake Rogers (oblique) has begun throwing but is not immediately close to returning. John Brebbia (triceps) and Sawyer Gibson-Long (elbow/hip) have also resumed throwing. The Tigers have a top 3 pitching staff in the MLB, which was a possibility headed into the year, and a top 5 offense, which was not. We’ll see if the bats stay hot, but they are right now (even McKinstry!) and the Tigers are taking advantage. Do not take it for granted.

Igor: How Did It Age? By: Ian Sherry 11/18/2024 I once saw a clip of a radio show or something (I wish I could remember to give proper credit) where this guy did impressions of rappers and then explained how different artists rap from different places - Biggie from his stomach, Tupac from his heart, JAY-Z from the top of his throat - you get the idea. He had clearly studied their creative process with his ears well enough to replicate it. Impressive. When it comes to Tyler The Creator (who raps from a variety of places), I’d like to focus on a different part of the creative process - inspiration. Before you can rap or pursue any creative endeavor, you have to draw inspiration. In the morbidly broad field that is ‘music’, there is a wide variety in quality depending on the alignment of motivation, setting, and talent. Not all of these alignments are made equal - the periods where an artist is sufficiently motivated in an inspiring setting result in the very best music, and they don’t last forever. Tyler The Creator is a period artist, meaning he has encountered and capitalized on several crucial moments - several alignments of those 3 crucial factors - throughout his artistic career. While it’s hard to determine from the outside looking in and only he can truly know where his music comes from, it seems obvious that Tyler had a shift in inspiration between his Odd Future era releases and his coming of age record Flower Boy . Following that jump in maturity, with his motivation, setting, and talent level evolving once again he embarked on his 3rd, most inspired period: Igor . As we border on what could be the horizon of a new era with his latest release CHROMAKOPIA , I thought it was the perfect time to revisit Tyler’s unforgettable 2019. IGOR: How Did It Age? What I’m ultimately trying to express with my ‘period’ concept is that an artist's ability to draw inspiration has a major impact on the potential of the product. Tyler is just too good of an illustration: the Igor period seems to have lasted just one year and was the result of a creative wildfire that began to kindle in the artistic rock bottom that many perceive Cherry Bomb to be. In contrast, Call Me If You Get Lost was a recovery effort in the aftermath of said wildfire. Following what I can only imagine were life-altering changes that came with his sudden emergence on Pop Culture’s center stage and the subsequent pandemic, Tyler spoke about hitting a creative rut. He also mentioned that a certain Westside Gunn helped him find inspiration again, hence the boastful pseudo-fashion rap nature of his 2021 album. Gunn is powered by this cycle of professionally inspired inspiration that consists of finding joy in success, remembering and reminding how he came upon that success, and using all of that as motivation to go get more. Tyler tapped into that cycle of success and leaned safely into his strengths on the last record; that’s why I loved it, but that’s also why it isn’t an era-defining type of record. He’s not Tyler The Gunn, he’s Tyler The Creator, and Tyler created Igor . If it’s so great why do I need to revisit it? Well, now I have a confession to make. Igor really is all the things I built it up to be, but recently I had this startling thought: is it actually good music? Pundits were quick to jump on the freight train that was Tyler’s uber-alternative new sound for a variety of reasons: first, progressive-edged subject matter gives any project a boost, second, his metamorphosis from an off-color goofball rapper to a self-serious embodiment of his latest album was shocking, and lastly, the sound itself is so intentionally abrasive and self-aware it becomes difficult to critique. Of course, the critics could have said something like ‘This music sucks because I don’t like it’, but that’s not why they get paid the big bucks. I joke, but it is actually that last point I’d like to revisit. Despite my readiness to be blown away by it, I remember being a little unsure if I even liked the album when it first came out. I’d never heard anything like it, and I still really haven’t, but there everyone was celebrating it as one of the decade’s best musical moments, so I followed suit. Next thing I knew, I was watching YouTubers break down the album’s storyline. That’s because in 2019 being a fan of Igor was a lot of fun. The communal excitement music can generate is infectious, and nostalgic memories of this album’s fever-pitch reception will always positively factor into its aging process, but I wonder if retrospect will show the same kindness to the sound itself. Now, if I’ve properly introduced this album, you ought to be wondering was it the excitement that elevated the album to an alt music masterpiece, or does it truly measure up over time? Let’s dig in. To appreciate Igor you must first digest its sound. Some do quicker than others, and I think that depends entirely on your own personal tastes. If you listen to a lot of Tyler’s music, you can get a good idea of where the Igor sound sprung from, but if this album were your first encounter with Tyler, there’s a much wider variety of ways you might experience, understand, and classify it. For example, I’m listening to Portishead as I write this article and there are definite similarities between their more hip-hop-aware periods and Tyler’s more atmospheric trip-hop style. One is a British rock band, the other an American rapper who’s banned from the UK, but their sonic spectrums overlap to a point. I could easily imagine being a big Portishead fan listening to Igor for the first time and experiencing track 1 as a popified relative of my favorite band. That’s because “IGOR’S THEME” starts the record off with a heavy-handed display of the big droning synths, 808s, and heavy distortion that give the album its edge. It also establishes a noticeably high pace that adds to the mystique of the sound and can be adjusted to aid the albums storytelling through tone. All that is to say, it’s the perfect song to start the album. Those kinds of project-focused decisions must’ve come so easily to Tyler The Creator in 2019. Most transitions on this album are fairly seamless and the outliers feel intentionally excused for one reason or another. Track 2 “EARFQUAKE” , the album’s biggest hit, introduced Igor ’s newly established stylistic palette to the mainstream, and, in tandem with Playboi Carti , Tyler rode his unconventionally altered vocals to number 5 on the Billboard before transitioning effortlessly to track 3. “I THINK” is built with a lot of the same bones you’d find in Kanye West’s prime production and begins to settle subtly into Tyler’s more familiar poppy alt-rap stomping grounds. Post the smoothly incorporated interlude track 4 , Tyler remains in his wheelhouse on “RUNNING OUT OF TIME” . Having established that sonic edge in track 1, given the album a sound-defining candidate in track 2, and maintained the usage of his quirky new vocal stylings throughout, Tyler The Creator already cultivated a potent sonic theme by the 5th song. Because it's so strong, that theme, or at least its influence remains present even on a sonically lighter song like “RUNNING OUT OF TIME”, building tension that draws the listener in and elevates the effectiveness of the song's progressions. That theme’s constant presence also makes it easy to jump into Igor mode. For instance, on track 6, “NEW MAGIC WAND” , as Tyler The Creator’s alter-ego permanently enters the album’s plot, he returns to the heavy-handed electronic atmosphere of “IGOR’S THEME” to go with a grinding horrorcore-esque rapping performance. The stylistic flexibility Tyler allowed himself made it possible to place songs like those back to back. Without the ability to make tough transitions work, he couldn’t have properly communicated the topsy-turvy love affair Igor intended. "A BOY IS A GUN" Despite all the superlatives, sometimes I get the feeling that this is less of a perfect album, and more of a well-executed gameplan, one that’s impossible to poke holes in. He chose an intentionally imperfect sound that negates any criticisms of sonic unpleasantries, took the liberty of dipping into his comfort zone despite the ambitions of his new sound, aligned it with a lyrical plot that supports his musical decisions, and gave songs that wouldn’t necessarily stand up well on their own a slot that allows them to thrive. There’s lots of circumstantial evidence building to support the idea that this is more of a great plan than it is a great album, so this is when I point to track 7. When I review albums, I review just that - the album. My focus is on the strength of each song of course, but as it pertains to their inclusion in the whole. Rarely do I give extended time-of-day to any particular song because it only represents a fraction of the total experience. I prefer it that way because a single song in a vacuum can become exhaustive. This however is a special occasion. “A BOY IS A GUN” arrived at a crucial point in the album. Following a back-to-back display of songs on polar opposite sides of the album’s sound, Tyler The Creator delivered the perfect semblance of their pieces. It has the build of a hip-hop song as he immediately establishes the beat and hook, making transitions between well-rapped verses seamless for the length of the song. The lyrics excellently navigate the rising action of his album-long romance with the vicious honesty of a man who’s finally out of patience. His herky-jerky flow makes for addictive listenability, as does the stop-and-go he expertly wove into the structure of the song to maintain tension and therefore your attention, leaving you susceptible to its many instrumental shifts. “A BOY IS A GUN” is as smooth, challenging, and unique as any song on the album, making it the perfect Igor song. ...anyway Here’s a metaphor for all you drinkers! Listening to “PUPPET” on the tail of the best song on the album is my version of a terrible hangover. Is it that bad of a song? In the grand scheme of things no, but it highlights everything I struggle with on the album. Its lack of pace creates a subsequent failure in the Igor formula. With more time to process, it's easy to hear some of the iffy instrumental quality - little imperfections that Tyler swept under the rug of electronic commotion in order to achieve a larger-scale sound. On top of that, the Kanye feature is complete garbage that Tyler attempted to fashion into usable material, and the bridge is a turd. I could go on but I won’t - it’s about the album remember? The singular skid of the album continues with “WHAT’S GOOD” (the song sure isn’t), which stands as Tyler’s only production miss on the record. It fails to catch any groove and rotates unsatisfyingly between two beats I really don’t care for. Luckily, with his duds out of the way, Tyler was ready to finish the album strong. The final three songs are a perfect example of the album supporting the songs. They all exemplify the album’s sound in some way or another, benefit significantly from their placement in the narrative as well as the tracklist, and have greater relevance within the complete package than they would on their own. Track 10 is “GONE GONE / THANK YOU” . Igor ’s falling action begins with a great build. The intro draws you in and the thankfully listenable instrumental is nicely accompanied by his chipmonked vocals. In my opinion, this is one of the few occasions on the album where a strong performance in his natural voice wouldn’t have sufficed or been preferable, as his autotune allows him to marry with the music in a way he couldn’t have otherwise. Then, I think just for me, he spat a great verse in his normal voice before giving way to the second part of the song which feels like a glorified outro for the first. “I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE” represents the end of the romance, and sets the final stage with one of Tyler’s cleanest trip-hop/alt-hip-hop cuts to date. Then lastly, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS” takes that listenability to the next level with a bright little soul sample that lays the groundwork for its lengthy build. It winds up and breaks itself down to some increasingly faint electric guitar, before roaring back one more time for the album's grandiose, cinematic closing moments. It’s a fittingly overdone last track, in hue of “Stand Tall” from Childish Gambino’s masterpiece Awaken My Love , and it brings Igor to a proper end. It’s time to return to that question I made you pose to yourself in the beginning (moment in time or masterpiece?). As a person who was there in 2019 experiencing Tyler’s takeover, its impossible to separate the album from its initial existence. The obsessive fanfare elevated Igor at the time, there’s no question, but I have my own question. If it can elevate it then, why not now? If an album relies on audience buy-in to thrive, as long as the audience keeps buying in, it remains a validated piece of art - it works. Five years after its release, Igor still works. I was pleasantly surprised to find that an album whose sound was such a product of the moment has maintained its complexity. I was afraid that by digging in I might start to see through the world Tyler created, that I might not be able to get past surface-level blemishes. To an extent the aging process isn’t preventable - it comes with familiarity - but, I’m very familiar with Igor, and while it might not necessarily soar to the heights it did in its early ragingly successful existence, it will survive. That’s because no matter how this particular sound develops, regardless of who might come along and do it better, and despite the occasionally spotty quality that comes with carving out a new niche, the album’s greatest strengths will remain unaffected. It is a story with a beginning and end, an all-encompassing thematic undertaking, a meaningful and relatable message, and a complete intentionally unified piece of music. Igor is an 8.5 .

THE BEST ALBUMS OF 2022 1/20/23 BY: Ian Sherry Making top ten lists, especially when there are as many options in a given category as there are in this one, is plain stupid. So here is mine. Honorable Mentions All of these albums are really solid but fell short of the list for some reason or another. However, they are all worth a listen. The Forever Story, JID Melt My Eyez See Your Future , Denzel Curry The Boy Named If , Elvis Costello Ants From Up There , Black Country New Road Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You , Big Thief Fear Of The Dawn , Jack White THE LIST 10. I Didn't Mean To Haunt You , Quadeca Let me start by saying that Quadeca is only 22 years old, yet, he has already undergone a full metamorphosis as a musician. He began his career as a YouTuber and transitioned into making uninspiring and unimpressive rap music. However, something switched in his head; he realized just how important music is to him as well as what he is capable of. His 2021 project showed signs of his capabilities as he began to switch into a wildly different musical space than that of his 2019 project. On I Didn’t Mean To Haunt You , Quadeca has fully arrived. While it isn’t as polished as the remaining albums on this list, he attacks the concept he chose and delivers numerous performances that nobody could’ve seen coming just three years ago. This album is at times touching, even overwhelming, and his dedication and embrace of his vision is what made it all possible. Best Song: "Born Yesterday" 9. SOS , SZA The last few years there has been a specific sub-genre forming somewhere in between pop and R&B. People like Summer Walker, Ella Mai, and Jhene Aiko have all been major artists, but SZA is leading the charge. Because of her position of influence with the blossoming genre, SZA had a lot of pressure on her leading up to this release. In my opinion she has the responsibility of leading this young and popular sub-genre in the right direction. Often artists in this vein of music have a tendency to make enjoyable, but ultimately safe and somewhat bland music. SZA decided to take risks on SOS and it paid off. The second two thirds of the album marks some of her most creative work to date. A few well placed and unexpected features mixed in with her ability to meander across pop-adjacent genres earns SZA the number nine spot on this year's list. Best Song: "Open Arms" 8. Once Twice Melody , Beach House Beach House is well-established at this point. They are experts of their craft and are able to consistently deliver what their fans are looking for. However, they occasionally seem to play it safe. They found their unique sound and are comfortable staying there. This album is a great step forward. They didn’t depart from their bread and butter, however they did improve upon it. We hear different vocal styles and more rangy instrumentals than expected. At a time where they did not need to do anything special, they took good steps creatively to deliver a very well rounded album. If you enjoy gentle vocals and atmospheric production, this album is for you without a doubt. Best Song: "Pink Funeral" 7. age/sex/location , Ari Lennox This is just a great album. Admittedly I did not know much about Ari Lennox going into this album; now, I do. She is a versatile artist with a great voice who feels comfortable in every style she tries on age/sex/location. Right off the bat she reminded me of Erykah Badu and Beyonce. She has the attitude, clever verses, and vocal tone of Erykah Badu on occasion, and she combines that with runs and spoken hooks that Beyonce loves to utilize as well. Ari’s usage of base reminds me of Adi Oasis as well, if you’re not familiar with her and like this album you should check her out next. She is very effective when moving between influences and different styles, and that is a big reason why this album is great. All of the featured artists do their job and the result is a great sophomore album from an artist that can bring listeners together from different sides of the contemporary R&B spectrum. Best Song: "Leak It" 6. It’s Almost Dry , Pusha T I listen to a lot of rap, and there were a lot of great albums this year. However, only one of them was a top ten album. On It’s Almost Dry , Pusha T reaffirms the fact that he has one of the most prolific deliveries in the rap industry. He continued on the roll he started with Daytona four years ago and did so with superstar producers Pharrell Williams and Kanye West. The production has fingerprints of these great artists all over it, but Pusha T makes sure to put his own stamp on it first and foremost. Though it doesn’t quite measure up to the all time great Daytona , it's great to see him in the same creative space four years later operating at that same high skill level. All of the features are good and its ‘worst’ songs are still ones that Pusha T fans will enjoy. Best Song: "Dreamin Of The Past" 5. Gemini Rights , Steve Lacy If you ask a given person what they think of Lacy’s 2022 album they are likely to respond one of three ways. They either have never heard of it, think it's the album of the year, or hate it with a passion. I think it's certainly up there. Steve’s first two albums after breaking off from The Internet, a band where he was the lead guitarist, were interesting but ultimately fell short much of the time. They were cluttered and seemed to need more time to mature into a fuller sound. He was not discouraged. Gemini Rights is a polished and creative album that can be enjoyed by a wide range of audiences. The contempt for this album mostly stems from the vast overplaying of its hit single "Bad Habit". In reality this is not a top song on the album. Though Steve is probably the weakest vocalist of the top five, he seems to be one of the most musically knowledgeable. He has a fantastic ability to cohesively mix instruments that are staples of a variety of genres, such as the trumpet and of course, the guitar. I am excited to see what he does going forward. Even though this was a well rounded album, I think further polishing could place him at the top of his field. Best Song: "Sunshine" 4. RENAISSANCE , Beyonce With RENAISSANCE , Beyonce has completed the elusive perfect three album run. This isn’t to say every song on all of them is perfect, but the evolution of her music and quality of her last three studio releases earned her this fictional honor. Beyonce , Lemonade , and RENAISSANCE are all fantastic, but RENAISSANCE definitely is my favorite. She incorporates elements of EDM and club dance beats perfectly into this pop album. She sings over these beats like it's nothing and nails a style that I never expected her to touch. She had no reason to try it other than it was part of her creative vision. I am thankful for her bravery at a point in her career where she could coast and sell records with ease. That all being said, the only reason this isn’t a number one album is because it has two of the weakest songs on this entire list. On top of that, I never thought I would compile a list like this in which Beyonce’s vocals are second best, but this year they are. That all being said, it's an incredibly bold and well executed album that everyone should listen to if they haven’t yet. Best Song: "VIRGO’S GROOVE" 3. Lucifer On The Sofa , Spoon Spoon. They’re really good and all, but I never thought they would be in this spot this year. If you like rock this is exactly what you need. It has been a while in my opinion, since there was an amazing archetypal rock release. As the album progressed I enjoyed each song more and more. These songs are familiar in the best possible way, as if people have been listening to this record for years. Lucifer On The Sofa is very well executed and curated. It's ten songs and each one of them is different enough to switch things up but not so much that it doesn’t flow perfectly. They have a grimy instrumental feel but the tracks as a whole are smooth and perfectly paced. Britt Daniel’s vocals remind me of Bowie at times because they have significant texture but are easy to listen to and feel elevated. The album flies by. I think this is their best release and the only reason it isn’t in the number one spot is that I just want more than ten songs. Ten is nothing to scoff at but all of the top three are great and there’s just less on Lucifer On The Sofa. I flipped a coin to pick the best song on this album. Then I flipped it for like four other songs. It's so good. Listen to this album. Best Song: "The Devil & Mister Jones" 2. MOTOMAMI, Rosalia Rosalia is a force of nature. If you aren’t acquainted with her yet, get ready. The Spanish singer is the best vocalist on the list this year, and I was blown away by this album. Of the top four, her album is the least cohesive and I saw complaints about the lack of flow and centralized themes. My argument is this: this album is a showcase of the incredible talent that is Rosalia and the theme is exactly that. At any given point you might hear a touching and beautifully performed song followed by an upbeat dance track, and that might be followed by an abstract beat with spoken verses. She is versatile. She is entertaining. She is exactly what pop music needs. In the last few years mainstream music has seen the ride of acts like Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, and Olivia Rodrigo. As talented as they are in their lanes, none can touch the pure talent and versatility of Rosalia. Is it the most well rounded album? No, but it showcases more than any other album on this list. This is another album that’s so good I can’t pick a song. I will anyway but know that it won’t fully encapsulate everything that she accomplishes on this record. Best Song: "Sakura" 1. Wet Leg, Wet Leg This is the album of the year. Every single song is perfect. I don’t listen to much indie pop, so my opinion is an inexperienced one, but this is the best album I’ve ever heard in this genre. They have great vocals, creative, diverse song structure, and witty lyrics. Listening to them makes me happy, but they have the ability to steer your mood in different directions depending on their well written lyrics. They tell stories both with their words and their instrumentals. With this much talent it's no surprise that they caught a lot of media attention. They appeared on TV and on indie radio stations everywhere, spreading the word about this incredible project. I could go on and on, but I’ll keep it simple. They deliver everything you could want from a group like them. The craziest part? It's their debut. This is the album of the year. Best Song: "Chaise Longue" My closing thoughts are these: If any of these interest you please listen to them. If you disagree with me you’re wrong. If you disagree with the Grammy nominations or winners you’re right. And, this was a great year of music.

RAYE: The real deal BY: IAN THOMAS SHERRY, 5/4/2026 Raye dropped her smashing LP THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. on March 27, and if you’re just now hearing of her, you’re late. It was Saturday Night Live (which is generally upholding the tradition of quality musical curation on variety shows, Arsenio, Chappelle, all the way back to Ed Sullivan) where I first discovered Raye. That was before her three Grammy nominations, and I was late then. Now, we’ve entered a new era of international pop. My 21st Century Blues (’23) was an ambitious foundational record, the product of Raye’s departure from Polydor Records. I listened to the debut in the wake of my stumbling upon Raye and knew she could do better. The sturdy collection of long-fermented music featured a variety of pop and r&b flavors plus flashes of her tone as a writer, yet despite its critical acclaim (especially across the pond) I found it musically thin and thematically broad. Not to worry, neither of those tropes are present on this 2026 LP. “Intro: Girl Under The Grey Cloud” is an excellent entrance into the most theatrical record I have ever listened to. The music of musical theater, especially when removed from the performance, makes my stomach turn. That is historically, but Raye’s sonic gravitas, worldbuilding, monologuing and all around-performative efforts can be described as nothing short of theatrical, so here I am at the breaking point of another personal precedent. The songstress stumbles from one stormy scene into another as (Track 2) “I Will Overcome” rumbles around. The true intro more-or-less continues the narrative: a drunk gal out on the town, far past anyone’s bed-time, searching for the answers to, well… everything. The focus narrows over the next four tracks. Time to more deeply address the sound I suppose. It’s a bright pacey pop, boosted by a 21st century studio and big band thunder, background vocals and a prancing matriarch at the center of it all. Raye preaches warnings on the (Track 3) “Beware.. The South London Lover Boy.” She tells a precautionary tail over a twirling keyboard/808 hook on (Track 4) “The WhatsApp Shakespeare.” Then there’s the theatrical masterpiece (Track 6) “Click Clack Symphony.” Raye revisits her well of 20-something depression and treats her vulnerability with girlpower. She assembles the gals, “send the call out, send the call out!,” and sets out on the town hoping to lose the inside thoughts outside, using the click-clacking heels as her beat. (Track 7) “I Know You’re Hurting.” must be the day after. This tune is the page-1 example of the triumphant music achievable at the peak of pop. When combined with the wholistically performative sensibilities of someone genuine, spirited and talented like Raye, a pop studio can create tear-jerking moments in the middle of Walmart. HUT. And now a brief advertisement for America’s second son, Jazz music baby. Well, ‘we’ brewed up this mystical instrumental gumbo with European instruments, so I guess it’s only fair that they get a take on it. Still, I often hesitate to consider the big blaring British bands I hear on 007 soundtracks to be jazz. I mean somewhere below “Gold Finger”s hollering horns Jimmy Page was just lurking, playing sheet music, a proper jazz band would’ve drawn that behemoth out, no? But still, the branches of British jazz bear undeniable fruit, Amy Winehouse at the very minimum. “This song is called ‘I Hate The Way I Look Today’,” says Raye. A statement of fact is followed by a beautifully bumbling brigade of similar thoughts as she raps and rambles, in true jazz style, a laundry list of complaints about her physical person. Comedic, relatable, listenable, Raye refuses not to check all the boxes, and this jazzy break at track 9 was a brilliant move to further flesh out her musical chops and back up a big claim from track 2: “And it’s funny, some people say I remind them of Amy.” Call me some people. (Track 10) “Goodbye Henry” begins with another cheekily dejected monologue, the kind Ms. Carpenter dreams to achieve, and I’m feeling frisky so I’ll share: “This is a sad song/ Though it feels happy / It is not happy at all, in fact / It makes me so, so sad to sing this song /But I will sing it for you anyway / This song is called "Goodbye Henry" / And I wrote it 'bout a boy / A very lovely boy/ And his name isn't even Henry/ But I'm just tryna be respectful / We don't talk anymore / He could be next-door and I wouldn't even know /In another life we could have made it /But in this one, well, we let go…” From there the bounding soul track wonderfully lives up to its billing. Raye rides horns, keys and drums like a tricycle and welcomes Al Green at the bridge, a treat for the ears as much as the heartstrings. (Track 11) “Nightingale Lane.” is yet another highlight, this time an Adele-style ballad. Over a pretty generically supportive score, Raye opens up those impressive vocal cords of hers, which she often opts to nimbly control, and wails a well-written chorus. She is comfortable at any pace, dancing through tracks all record long and adjusting with effortless swagger to the speed limit on “Nightingale Lane.” Did we mention that THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE? (Track 12) “Skin & Bones.” shocks the LP back to this decade’s pop pace for a number-1-worthy track. The equally catchy (Track 13) “Where Is My Husband!” stands as Raye’s top-charting song in the US, peaking at 11 on the Billboard. It’s curios that Raye’s exposure in the American media has yet to convert to top-10 radio play; the disconnection between fame and fortune has indeed sewn itself into modern media arenas. Her dime will come, never fear, so long as Raye continues to make songs like (Track 15) “Joy.” This late-album hit has the juice of certain 2010 smash hits as a big brass section jumps on top of a sleek afrobeat (which sticks around in the form of a rhythmic 808). The band’s sound and volume takes me back to Fifth Harmony’s prime, Jessie J, rooftop pop. (Track 16) “Happier Times Ahead.” Carries the same sentiment, sound and quality into the album’s conclusion, “Fin,” which functions as an audible credit-roll. Raye’s lyrics are good, the world she built excellent, her voice unique, vocal style unparallelled. She deserves to be praised in the same international pop circles as her British pop foremothers, Latin juggernauts and American stars. She deserves mentioning in the same conversations as young visionaries like Cameron Winter. And if she keeps up this pace, Raye will earn mentions in conversations about the all-time greats. THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE is a 9.1.

PUTTING YOU ON THREE BY: Ian Sherry 5/22/2023 For music fans, there is no better feeling than discovering a new artist. Whether it’s a sleepless 2:00 AM deepdive, the opener that outperformed the band you actually came to see, or you decided (at risk of being lame) to finally listen to the Beatles, musical discovery is an unmatched feeling. This year has been kind to me thus far, so to celebrate I’d like to share my three favorite “underground” discoveries. In order of monthly listeners on Spotify, here are my three. They are all active artists who have lots of potential and could use your help, so if my descriptions appeal to you please check them out. Elijah Landours Technical Juggernaut 2,135 Monthly Listeners Though he has the least number of streams of these three talented artists, Elijah Landours may be the most polished. The Indianapolis rapper only has one album out on streaming services to go with several singles, yet his strengths are clear in this admittedly brief discography. Landours has a style. A groundbreaking one? No, but it’s consistent, recognizable, and entertaining. He does things in his music that many world-famous artists still fail to grasp. The first aspect of Landours’ musical repertoire is his sampling instincts. He uses them as frequently as anyone else, but he is so meaningful. A tendency of big money rap projects recently is over-sampling. It isn’t necessarily a negative, meaning an extra sample may not hurt the song. But, the purpose of introducing someone else’s work into yours is to pay homage and create a sound you wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s what he does. “PROPANE” is a good example off the 2022 project N/A . It makes use of a straight Marvin Gaye sample, but I don’t want a lawsuit so I’ll talk about “REVENGE FOR LOST TIME”. Also off N /A, he opens with a silly audio clip before introducing the faded and looped sample with distorted vocals and trumpet run. He then lays a simple drum machine and base hits over the top. He leaves the sample quietly underneath and brings it up over the top on occasion to add flavor to the heavyweight rhythm. Landours’ flow rides over the top of his most dense soundscape for one of his best songs, despite a feature I could take or leave. This leads me to Landours’ secret sauce. He has an uncanny ability to work over the top of his instrumentals. This is that polish coming into play again. No matter the speed of the beat, he is able to pace himself and dictate the energy of the song. Many artists have a tendency to try to be on the same pace as the beat, Landours’ knows better. It’s especially evident in some of his hooks. “MYSELF” and “MYLES AWAY” are his two most popular songs and for good reason. He is able to accelerate in and out of his verses to seamlessly shift the tone of the song. Both songs have sample-based beats which the hooks match in pace. They then make swift shifts into higher energy and pace on the verses. This allows him to use simple beats to create a comfortable groove for the listener because he provides all the necessary flavor in his delivery. Elijah Landours is a technical beast with an ear for beats and a lot to say. His execution comes off as relentless and sincere. Oftentimes I find myself imagining what artists could feature on his projects, from Black Thought to Denzel Curry. His soul flips and lyrical prowess are on the level of today’s best and brightest and his more unique strengths are a level above that. Elijah Landours is the real deal, he is ready, he just needs you to listen. https://unitedmasters.com/elijah-landours Ally Evenson Narrative Weaver 21,885 Monthly Listeners Disclaimer: Ally Evenson is Detroit based, so I may be biased. Her discography, while it may be the smallest on the list with one EP and five singles, has a promising level of diversity. She has a good grasp of Pop as a genre and its ability to bridge stylistic gaps while maintaining one sound and stylistic label. Not that labels matter, but within pop she’s given herself the ability to grow under one roof (and within one algorithm) while showing off her versatility and trying new things. When I listen to Evenson, her wide range of influences and natural musical instincts are clear, making a trip through her discography very rewarding for new listeners. Evenson’s recent singles have been most successful in terms of streaming, signaling positive growth, but her 2020 EP Not So Pretty gives what I consider the most essential taste of her abilities. Her singing performances are solid all the way through, nailing the sad-girl pop aesthetic with vocals that border on whining but settle in a genuinely vulnerable place. The first three songs “Not So Pretty”, “Why Don’t You Call Me Anymore?”, and “Burning Room” all lean into that same style. Their lyrics and song structure are impressive as she is able to change direction without any major shifts in composition or delivery. They move along and keep the listener tied into their easy to swallow narratives. Admittedly, the fourth song “More of a Happiness” sticks out in an otherwise uniform release, and though it's out of place, it may be the strongest track. The best way to describe it, in my mind, is a beach song. Washy guitars, an upbeat rhythm, and smooth vocals that feel like one continuous chorus, it’s a welcome change in direction. It stands as proof that she’s a good collaborator (with Katrine Noël in this case), and a reminder that Evenson knows her stuff, making it a perfect interjection for an early-career release. I’d wager the biggest reason for Ally Evenson’s growth as of late is her honing in on a consistent signature sound. That creativity is still present, but her 2022 singles feel like a good indication of her future direction. Fairly simple strong structure, often building from a simple acoustic guitar to more heavily layered high points, goes with her ability to build tension with her vocals. “Bite My Tongue” is a great example. She remembers her way through a dead relationship, attempting to hold back negativity towards the person in question, only to have it boil over. Inevitably she’s forced to face the fact that she missed the chance to say what she needed to. She knows how to write a song and paint a picture. Whether it's through lyrical expressions of pain like on “I Can’t Feel (My Body)” or “Bite My Tongue”, a well placed audio clip like on “Good Morning, Al”, or just a vibe like “More of a Happiness”, she has command. Evenson is a creative and a student of the music game, and those ingredients are exciting to say the least. Her continued journey towards an easily recognizable sound is key, and her growth in streaming number will only encourage it. I am looking forward to Evenson's 2023 releases, and I hope you'll join me on the lookout. https://linktr.ee/allyevenson Gretel Hänlyn Musical Swiss Army Knife 165,440 Monthly Listeners London is one of the most unique and diverse cities in the world. This goes for music as much as anything else, and Gretel Hänlyn is proof of that. Her sound is unique and I believe her ceiling is the highest of these three artists. She has two EPs out on streaming services, and while they are wildly different from one another, her voice and personality are true constants between them. Hänlyn seems to be executing her visions on a near expert level and her creative ambitions and talent will carry her far. Gretel Hänlyn’s never-ending appeal begins with her voice. Her tone and versatility cannot be taught. Though it's hard to conclusively say where an artist feels strongest, Hänlyn seems to thrive singing in her naturally deep voice which she can pitch up or down. She doesn’t need to throw her voice at all to hit the notes she desires on a given song. This is something that many incredible vocalists, Prince for example, aren’t fortunate enough to have been born with. They may be able to hit notes with added concentration and polish, but Gretel can do it without a second thought. While the ability to range up and down without any significant heightened focus may seem like more of a convenience than an advantage, that’s not the case. In fact, I think it’s a big reason she is such a dynamic artist. It gives Hänlyn the ability to focus on supplying her performances with emotion, creating unique melodies, keeping pace, and most importantly, entertaining. Like I briefly mentioned, her two releases are much different from one another, however, they are anything but singularly focused. The 2022 Slugeye is a 20 minute package of vividly heartfelt songs, indie-pop jams and takeaways from each track. It showcases her ability to elevate any song with a great chorus, sing a verse in any tone, and keep the audience off balance yet captivated. For promptness sake I’ll limit myself to one song: “In The Water”. It’s not the best song on the EP, but in my opinion it showcases her various tools the best. We hear her complete range, from the murky lows to the delicate highs, her beautiful vocables included. She writes it in one of her most common formats: a meandering mix between conversation, narrative, and her own thoughts. She also layers the instrumental as the song proceeds, beginning with some of her more stripped down production (usually serving more sensitive narratives) and building to a masterfully layered chorus that even includes what sounds like a harp laid over top. It’s elegant, it’s emotional, it’s beautifully performed, it’s entertaining, it’s Gretel Hänlyn. In 2023 she vowed to take her already fully formed sound and push it further on Head of the Love Club. The result is fantastic. So good I couldn’t resist writing a complete and overdue EP review . I have so much to say about Gretel Hänlyn I needed an entirely different article, if that doesn’t properly sum up her talent I don’t know what does. https://www.gretelhanlyn.com/ Musical discovery is the most essential role we can play as consumers. If you haven’t heard of these three, I am thrilled to introduce you. If you have, keep listening, so we can keep getting more. They are all very talented, and together they cover all aspects of experiencing music. I hope you agree.

Nicki Minaj, Again 12/22/23 BY: IAN SHERRY On December 8, 2023, Nicki Minaj released her first album in 5 years: Pi nk Friday 2 . Nicki Minaj embodies a unique position in today’s music landscape as one of the most simultaneously overplayed and underrated artists of all time. Like her pal Drake, her popularity often overshadows her technical ability, and her sound. Both artists are dismissed as one-dimensional based on the portion of their work that hits the charts. This is understandable, considering both artists produce stylistically unattractive moments on almost every album. However, if you really dig into Drake, you’d hear a decent rapper. Not my favorite by any means, but decent. Similarly, but to the extreme, if you really dig into Nicki Minaj, you’d hear one of the most skilled rappers of all time. Her influence on rap as an industry is immeasurable. From her mainstream sexual branding to her marketing and release strategies, to her pure skill and style on the microphone, she sets the standard for any rapper wishing to straddle the lines of hip-hop and pop. Minaj, in my book, is the undisputed queen of rap. This year, she was tasked with expanding her legacy after years away. Nicki Minaj, as good as she is, has never been the strongest at crafting a well-executed, complete album. This holds her back from certain elite conversations. Her flows and bars are consistently elite, but her thematic focus and song curation occasionally fall short. This isn’t to say she hasn’t made good albums, in fact she has some classics. But their status benefits greatly from their chart-topping hits and far-reaching influence. Even if they weren’t perfectly crafted masterpieces, Pink Friday , The Pinkprint , and Queen defined their respective eras of mainstream rap and have aged gracefully due to Minaj’s looming presence and unshakeable relevance. However, until the recent release of Pink Friday 2 , Nicki Minaj hadn’t made an album since 2018, raising the question: can she deliver in a culturally significant way? Although Minaj is still relevant, five years removed, she’s a clear notch below her prime popularity. Mainstream rap is heavily reliant on being in style, and she hasn’t been this far on the outside since she secured a feature on Kanye West’s “Monster”. That was in 2010, this is 2023. The Samples Danny Brown revealed sometime in the last 10 years (time flies when you can’t find the date of the video) that when constructing his critically acclaimed album Atrocity Exhibition , he expended so much of his production budget on securing the rights to samples, prior to rollout and other post-production expenses, that he initially lost money on the album. An up-and-comer at the time, Brown’s inexperience with fiscal management and industry norms, coupled with his enthusiasm for the music, led to him being broke when his 2016 record was released, and consequently, he stayed in the red for the years that followed. While I’m certain Nicki Minaj wasn’t scrolling through Danny Brown content on Instagram, she seems to be very aware of her capacity for luxurious samples. She lets you know immediately with “Are You Gone Already” , which samples Billie Eilish’s “when the party's over” . Off the top of my partially focused head, I can’t think of any other song that samples a song that charted so recently. If you read the Genius annotation, this is pitched as a collaboration between Eilish, Minaj, and FINNEAS, but in reality it’s a remix of the pop hit with a partial lyrical alignment between the rap verses and sampled refrain that sets the tone. Meanwhile on “Pin k Friday Girls” and “Super Freaky Girl,” Minaj attempts to assemble poppy anthems around “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” and “Super Freak,” respectively. A common criticism of rap, uttered by many including Prince, is that sampling is a way to construct your ‘music’ entirely around someone else’s work. This implies that a rapper jumps in the studio and begins vocalizing over a slightly restructured version of someone else’s original. Anyone who’s listened to intricate sample-work, (check out The Alchemist), would understand this is an inaccurate, outmoded take. And now you’ll have to brace yourself for an immediate contradiction. On all three of the aforementioned songs, Minaj only makes slight alterations to the original song, cutting verses and adding drums and bass. She even lazily chipmunks Blondie’s “Heart of G lass” f or the chorus of “My Life” . The basic repackaging of all these former hits allows Nicki Minaj to lay down different personas over a canvas that was painted for her. This is a fine strategy on paper, but so is fouling Shaquille O’Neil every time he touches the ball. It’s just not what we’re here for. Danny Brown didn’t have the money to spend, but he spent it anyway on creative sample selection, which he wove into one of the most unique individual album soundscapes in hip-hop history. So after five years away, Nicki Minaj had plenty of money to spend, and she chose to spend it on a random shuffle of chart-topping hits. The Flows Switching to the positive, Nicki Minaj has one of the most multifaceted vocal delivery skillsets of all time. She can rap in a variety of speeds, moods, even accents. At this stage in her career, sustaining an elite level of vocal expertise is easier said than done. Legendary rappers like Eminem or Q Tip, for example, have been rendered vocally unimpressive in recent years. In other words, it’s possible to age out of your flows. Minaj hasn’t. Pink Friday 2 ’s second track, “ Barbie Dangerous,” comes out firing as the jumping-off point of the album. She works with pace and precision, setting a high standard that she maintains for the majority of the album. Whether it’s going bar-for-bar with J Cole (he’s on a tear) on “Let Me Calm Down,” embracing Lil Uzi Vert’s 2023 sound on “Everybody,” bringing in the island sound on “Forward From Trini,” or parading her early-career princess persona on “Pink Friday Girls,” Minaj delivers on expert rap performance after another. That kind of versatility is invaluable. It often allows Minaj to act as her own feature, considering her seamless shapeshifting from verse to verse. Frankly, that’s what holds this album together. The Givens If you listen to Nicki Minaj, this album is nothing new. We know she can rap, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we know she can’t sing. She does it anyway, often singing on her own choruses and refrains despite her access to a plethora of alternative options. This is a stylistically misguided choice that rappers like J Cole also fall victim to. However, unlike Cole, she often compiles mistakes by failing to supply sufficient instrumental backing on songs that emphasize her singing. But, like I said, I knew it was coming. I also knew this album would bring a mixed bag of features. J Cole and Lil Wayne deliver on tracks 6 and 7, while Drake and Future flop on tracks 9 and 19. I also knew there would be a mix of moods, which could be interpreted as aimless or diverse. “Fallin 4 You” is one of the best executed, vulnerable songs of Minaj’s career, while “Bahm Bahm” mirrors Minaj’s classic energy-infused club-radio formula. I knew the album would be defined more by its hits than skips. I knew the Barbs would make sure the album charted regardless of merit. I knew what to expect, and although I hoped for something else, (more out of desperation for the unpredictable than dislike for the usual), I was right. Nicki Minaj made another album, and it’s much like her others. Its mainstream relevance is measured in comparison to her past releases, but in proportion to her current cultural standing. The album scores points for it’s highlights, “Red Ruby Da Sleeze” and “Super Freaky Girl,” to name a few, but loses points since those singles were released 9 and 16 months ago respectively. Pink Friday 2 gave me so little to expand upon that I spent most of my energy analyzing Nicki Minaj’s mindset around sampling. So, to bring this review to a conclusion in a fittingly generic fashion, here’s a cliche to summarize the experience of Pink Friday 2 : For every push in one direction, there’s a pull in another. My disappointment stems from predictability, yet the inalienable positives of the Nicki Minaj sound push this album slightly into positive territory. I think the blank stare with which I’m listening to and writing about this album is the best summation of its quality, but I’ll give it a score nonetheless. Pink Friday 2 is a 5.3/10.

Did you know that Lana Del Rey likes exceptionally long titles BY: Ian Sherry 4/23/23 On March 24, Lana Del Rey released Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard. Lana is one of the strangest figures in music today. She made waves upon entry into the market and sparked backlash over her apparent status as an industry plant. While this rubs some people the wrong way, her fans are some of the most dedicated in all of music. They feed into her ever-changing and intentionally unique persona - and vice versa. The result is a catalog mix of inconsistencies, originality and creativity. For me, this is an overall positive characteristic, but it does complicate any quality-based judgments of her work. I generally believe that in cases like this (where the artist is weird outside the music, but not necessarily in it), it’s best to separate their public personas from the music to avoid over or under-crediting them based on personal bias. To be clear, her personality enhances the tone of the album, something that many artists struggle with. However, I don’t often find a significant alteration to the music itself. Yes, she has evolved as an artist, but the stylistic shifts from album to album have never been groundbreaking to me. Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard is easily better than her previous two releases, and while it isn’t a huge creative step forward, it innovates enough to please her hungry audience, and it includes some of her cleanest, well-rounded tracks to date. Lana’s atmosphere of choice on Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard is one of melancholy and nostalgia from the perspective of a woman intent on letting her emotional trauma fester through 77 minutes of painful memories. Her storytelling is, in short, unique. She carefully constructs emotionally raw narratives that the listener can feel. They’re often conversational, a dialogue between her and another person, sometimes an old friend, family member, or romantic partner, sometimes herself, and sometimes nobody at all. Lana’s storytelling, combined with her polished voice and attitude of comfortable familiarity, paints blurry images that must be clear to somebody - but we are not somebody. This atmosphere Lana constructed is present on all of her best songs on the record. I believe “Sweet”, “Kintsugi”, and “Fingertips” are some of the best examples, but excluding a select few, you can feel it in every song. In the past, Lana has struggled to lock into one really strong sound. On Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard , she does. However, her ability to mix things up without departing from her theme or comfort zone is what elevates this album. On “A&W”, the lengthiest song of the album at 7:13, Lana recounts short memories of past experiences, how they’ve soured her outlook on love and herself, and how she’s now a less worthy romantic acquisition. It’s a dark look into the troubled mind of someone lacking self-esteem and their subsequent inability to deal with emotions or even basic facts in a positive way. However, this outstanding narrative aside, what stands out the most to me is Lana sounding like Lorde. The first 4 minutes are a steady instrumental performance from a piano and acoustic guitar fronted by Lana’s meandering vocals, but the last three minutes break into something entirely different: the production suddenly switches to electronic, with base hits and a drum machine coming into play along with a buzzy finish on Lana’s up-pace vocals. It is very reminiscent of Lorde’s 2013 hit album Pure Heroine . From the building up and stripping down of the production to Lana’s repetitive lyrics and layered vocals, the finish to “A&W” is a shocking and well-executed finish to an emotionally raw song. This isn’t the only instance of Lana dipping into outside influences on her 2023 project. For instance, “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing”, yes that’s the title, reminds me of Kate Bush in a way. But what impressed me, even more than her incorporation of different sounds, was her use of features. Jon Batiste’s feature on “Candy Necklace” is the album’s first. I love Batiste, so I was excited to see how they would come together on this song. At first I was disappointed, as he only plays piano behind her fairly repetitive vocals. But by my third listen I changed my mind. Batiste is a genius with his hands on a piano, and his performance provides a unique backing to a straightforward, but enjoyable performance. They don’t always blend seamlessly, but there are successful moments when Lana changes pace or volume in unison with Batiste’s piano runs, which adds a very unique quality to the song. “Paris, Texas” feat. SYML, “Let The Light In” feat. Father John Misty, and “Margaret” feat. Bleachers are three of the strongest songs on the album. “Paris, Texas” features a simple instrumental accompaniment from SYML. His feature doesn’t add to the song as noticeably as the Batiste feature does, but it is one of the most well-done songs in Lana’s discography and might be my favorite on the album. “Let The Light In” is the most traditional feature on the album. Lana and Father John Misty duet on the chorus, adding to the fullness of a touching song while still allowing Lana to carry the personal and nostalgic narrative on her own. “Margaret” is similar to “Let The Light In”, but with a more dynamic performance from Lana. Bleachers plays a very similar role to Father John Misty, helping on the chorus and providing a point of return in the chorus for Lana to take the verses to different places. She shows more range on this one song than the rest of the entire album, and the instrumental is much more upfront in certain parts of the mix, elevating the song above the surrounding tracks. Without Bleachers holding down the chorus and providing a more mellow vibe, the exceptional contrast of “Margaret” wouldn’t have been possible. Lana Del Rey was clearly in a creative place for this album. While her creativity manifests itself in the album's best moments, it’s also evident in what I consider to be her biggest mistakes. The first shortcoming, “Judah Smith Interlude”, is an instrumentally backed rant that forces the listener to analyze it for any possible meaning before inevitably giving up before the 4:37 is up. I don’t know what she was getting at here, but I do know it doesn’t fit. Just two tracks later the “Jon Batiste Interlude” is a much better version. His piano backs up a distorted recording of his voice with some Lana vocals in the background. It feels like much more of an instrumental interlude than “Judah Smith Interlude”, and it’s a welcome addition to the flow of the album, unlike its predecessor. The second shortcoming comes in the last three songs. To be fair, I like Lana’s decision to shift from a mostly live recorded instrumental album to a more electronically produced finish starting on “Fishtail”. There are great moments of vocal distortion and sonic layering, but “Peppers” is simply out of place. As the second-to-last track on the album, it has a completely different vibe in the wrong way. In a different context it is a good song, which is why I wish she had released it as a sort of red herring single. It has a catchy chorus and some classic late 2000s vocals, which is exactly why it makes no sense here. Although I like “Peppers” on its own, I am baffled by its inclusion on Lana’s otherwise cohesive and focused 2023 project. A final minor critique: Lana’s verses don’t alway distinguish themselves from one another or the chorus because of the understated delivery. But, this is more of a preference issue on my part and a stylistic choice on hers. This album, in my mind, is an anomaly. Lana is overly-focused on a singular theme, something that has hurt, even delegitimized, some of her previous work. But, this time it is done perfectly. Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard combines some of Lana’s best songs with her most beautiful moments ever. Without “Judah Smith Interlude '' and “Peppers”, this album really flirts with perfection. Ironically, Lana Del Rey, who is often considered a semi-niche artist, has delivered an album I would genuinely recommend to nearly any audience. A simple rating can’t encapsulate how much I like this album. Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard is an 8.75/10.

WALK WITH ME V 1/18/2024 BY: IAN SHERRY Smiles aren’t worth a thing anymore. Aretha Franklin holds many titles and distinctions, the Queen of Soul, Rolling Stone’s greatest vocalist of all time , and the best funeral featuring an Ariana Grande performance - to name a few. She grew from the shockingly powerful youth vocalist in her father’s church choir to the voice of the world’s foremost musical city, and she built a career steeped with superlatives along the way. June 10, 2017. My dad and I hop on our bikes and take a ride into the heart of Downtown Detroit to see Aretha Franklin. The Queen of Soul’s hot summer performance was free to the public and it attracted the perfect crowd. Lifelong fans from around the metro area poured in. As my dad led me through the crowd looking for familiar faces, which he correctly assumed was inevitable, there was a buzz I haven’t felt in any setting or any form since that day. I was young, which placed me in the minority (in more ways than one). Aretha’s audience mirrored herself. It was the generation that had to choose whether or not they’d flee when the city fell on rough times, and whose choice to stay was rewarded with a musical movement unparalleled in its time. As I rode up, chained my bike to a lightpost, and followed my dad into that crowd, I stepped into Motown. In that moment, ‘Motown’ became much more than the legendary record label or a nickname for the city I’d spent my whole life in. Motown is a people, and just as that understanding began to sink in, The Queen took the stage. Suffice to say, even at her age, she was still Aretha. Covering hits from all corners of her catalog with the help of a masterfully curated cast of supporting performers, she gave the crowd more than our money’s worth. One year, two months, and six days later, she was gone. Lumped into one massive and incredibly significant memory, I’ll never forget walking through my neighborhood after Aretha’s passing. As my family and I walked to dinner, her voice and music poured out of houses on every block. Listening to the neighborhood’s memorial serenade, I kept thinking back to that concert. Though it felt like just days before, with The Queen of Soul at rest, it had fully sunken in, to a level that can’t be easily smoothed over with time. Now, whenever I listen to the Aretha Franklin songs that live in the air of my childhood memories, the first thing that comes to mind, fills my chest, is that final loveletter she sang to her city on that summer day. It’s a difficult pill to swallow. Like any other member of that 2017 summer concert crowd, I am very familiar with Aretha’s work from the 50s through the 70s as well as her commercial resurgences in ‘85 and ‘98 . In that time she covered all the bases. Regarding emotions, she took her audience through it all: the anger and sadness of a breakup, the longing of romantic loneliness, the fatigued satisfaction of finally finding the right one, catching a break. She speaks to friends, lovers, exes, you, me, and nobody in particular. An untouchable songwriter, performer, and short-form storyteller, walking in stride with The Queen is a privilege that any member of her audience can experience. But there is one emotion, one mode, that she seldom lets show: pure unbridled joy. Now, as my dad aptly pointed out in a brief discussion of this article, 'she’s pretty fired up on “Doctor Feelgood.” ' A great point that I nudge to the side for two reasons. 1, With a discography as vast as Aretha’s, you're bound to stumble across almost any mood. 2, I hope you can imagine, I bear a fairly hefty weight each time I listen to the songs I was raised on, including “Dr. Feelgood”, which may well have played on the way to the concert that morning or as we strolled through the neighborhood a year later. So to the fault of nobody but myself, in order to share a purely joyful, burden-free moment with Aretha Franklin, I needed something new. Luckily, about a year ago, I stumbled upon a record that I’m sure did not play on those summer days in 2017/18, a record that finally flipped my emotional script when listening to The Queen of Soul: So Damn Happy . In 2003, admittedly after her final return to commercial / critical relevance, Aretha released So Damn Happy . The record did not gain any critical traction, which is understandable considering that stage of her career, however it's the cited reasoning I take issue with. In their brief but harsh, paragraph-long review, Rolling Stone gave props to the efforts of Mary J Blige on the production, but ultimately thrust Aretha’s 2003 effort aside because the vocals were ‘shrill’. They claimed the vocalist, who they declared the greatest singer of all time two decades later, didn’t belong on the 2000s contemporary r&b instrumentals. Why is that? I have a theory. The music critic community, into which I seem to have injected myself, has an unspoken responsibility to conform to fairly uniform taste. Meaning, even if a given writer’s individual taste doesn’t align with what is widely considered high quality work, there is pressure to recognize its merit. This year's best example of this tendency is the critical acclaim afforded to Sexyy Red . The newest culturally dominant female rapper, her style is unapologetic, and to me, unappealing. I am certain that I’m not alone in this opinion, however taking an anti-Sexyy stance at this point in her career is risky to say the least. Blowback could take any number of forms, including accusations of gender-based disrespect and being disregarded as someone who simply isn’t up with the times. (So if you’ll allow me to cover myself briefly), Sexyy Red is one of the most talented artists we’ve seen in generations; she is the future, no doubt. The reason for my digression is simply to highlight the fact that coordination is important, from sharing opinions on a given album to the validation of the most common musical tropes. Artists like Phoebe Bridgers have built a career on their ability to elevate their easily approachable sound with heavily emotional writing and performances. Bridgers could easily sit in the mainstream of pop like Taylor Swift , but she sets herself to the side through her complete commitment to all things melancholy. In doing so, she limits, or rather, concentrates her audience, creating a distinct although not overly unique sound, and placing herself in the favor of critics everywhere. It’s the same factor that elevates artists like Big Thief or Jeff Buckley who dip into the sad sack and happen to be some of my favorites. Effectively conveying emotion through music is an achievement critics recognize across the board, however, they seem to disregard one key emotion: Joy. This brings me back to Aretha. For my money, there is no song in her entire discography more joyful than “Wonderful,” from So Damn Happy . After years and years of listening to The Queen battle through heartbreak and romantic confusion, there’s nothing more refreshing than experiencing a new thing, a good thing, by her side. She brings us into “Wonderful” with a bouncy and simple instrumental highlighted by flourishes on the keyboard. As strong a singer as ever, she rips through verses with her own flare, pace, and attitude, leading her backup singers through the sing-along-worthy chorus. As the energy builds throughout the song, Aretha begins to riff more on the microphone until the emotional climax in which her excitement takes control and transforms into joyful, nimble scatting. The entirety of So Damn Happy dabbles in a lot of musical and emotional elements, which may be largely responsible for its low profile, but “Wonderful” puts them together more effectively than any other song on her 2003 record. It's a simple yet perfectly executed step outside her wheelhouse, which is something that is critically celebrated in nearly any other scenario. So why haven’t you heard of it? Why is the song that makes me happier than any other not championed by critics the way they do Big Thief’s “Change” or Jeff Buckley’s “The Sky Is A Landfill?” Why is the nagging sadness I feel when listening to the music I associate with that final concert valued more than the joy I feel at the hands of my new discovery? Why is it that pulling your audience up into your state of happiness isn’t as critically significant as dragging them into your misery. Is it an industry trend? Is it the assumption that suffering is more relatable to the masses? Is it the widespread use of music as a coping mechanism for the streaming generation? Is it a societal obsession with hardship and misery? Don’t ask me, I love being happy. Listen to “Wonderful” if you do too.