The Rap-Up: After Hours

We break down new tracks from Vince Staples, RealYungPhil, Cash Cobain, and more.

Vince Staples, “White Flag”

Picture a bedroom with a couple of white teens slouched around it. Bags of chips litter the side tables, ragged AE 2s hang off a shoe rack, someone is shirtless for no reason, another hits a vape until the room resembles a gas chamber. Together they’re watching YouTube on a wall-mounted TV. A new Vince Staples video shows up on the homepage. They’re fans of his Crip raps and stonefaced jokes in interviews because that’s what breaks through to their timelines. They might’ve heard his songs in Into The Spider-Verse and seen his Sprite commercials, but really “Norf Norf” and “Yeah Right” is their shit. They’ve heard the chatter online of a genre flip. “I heard he made a rock album, man. Put it on!” “Hell yeah, what an artist,” they say, waiting for the “White Flag” video to load.

Whether based in the paranoia caused by being a black artist relying on a purchasing audience of mostly white people to pay his bills, Vince sees most of the fans engaging with his work in this light. What’s been missing from these teen’s timelines is Vince channeling the spirit of Dick Gregory when he speaks on a suffocatingly parasitic entertainment industry, or the music videos poking fun at these very fans. To force them into watching a black man whitewashing an American flag just to shoot holes through it with a semi-automatic weapon is to scare them into questioning their own safety for the first time. Their fragile alternate reality within America’s growing walls. Visually, Vince has never missed the mark. Musically, he’s almost never missed either. But for however blunt, timely, and easy to hum along to the lyrics on Cry Baby are, the rock-ish production has taken over the conversation around this continued radical subversion of his image. I say “-ish” because he’s still rapping a great deal and the instrumentation in question is so nondescript that if it got mixed in with your Black Keys playlist you’d wonder where all the energy went.

For an artist with a catalog you can stack against every West Coast great to make an album that subverts every preconceived notion about him is a level of control that’s rare for any creative to possess. For all the intention past and present to define Vince’s music, I see the genre classification as “alternative” and the bleached music as purposeful; a left hand middle finger to Def Jam, a right hand bird to whites and “their” music, and a final trap pulling in all those kids thinking rappers just make violent music for their enjoyment.

RealYungPhil f/ Kwes E & Kare, “Sold Out Shows”

RealYungPhil is bringing a healthier intercontinental flow of ideas than the World Cup. There’s a magic that happens when East Coasters dive into sounds from across the pond (e.g.- Pop Smoke’s early catalog, RX Papi’s all-timer Foreign Exchange, all the Drain Gang indebted ambient trap beats coming out of the DMV right now), and Connecticut’s RealYungPhil is keeping the pipeline humming across his spacey new album until something changes.

Freestyled without much apparent thought, Phil’s bars are simple quotes. Comparable to something you’d see on a cheap T-shirt ironically worn by thrifty college kids (“if I had a penny for every fuck I gave I’d probably be broker than you” or “shut up and listen the golden rule”), the words tumble out with a matching dead-eyed mumble. The blank, ash grey canvas he chooses to stitch his words to for “Sold Out Shows” was produced by Swedish cloud rap producers Woesum and Stacey, creating the atmospheric fog perfect for a couple of London rappers to hop on board. British rappers kwes e and kare fit right in among the foggy hues, flexing and frolicking with glee to pick up Phil’s unwaveringly low heart rate.

Cash Cobain, “I Wanna Rock”

Slizzy Season is upon us. It’s 90 degrees every day in NYC. Every hospital from Plattsburg to North Philly is about to be filled with newborns named Jalen, Karl, and Ogugua. To top it all off, the Barry White of the South Bronx has returned with the after-the-after-party jam to keep the temperature rising. Flexing his might as the King Of Sample Drill, Cash scrambles the late Rob Base’s “It Takes Two,” Usher’s “Lovers & Friends,” and Uncle Luke’s “I Wanna Rock” into Bomb Squad-level sound collage for the Clase Azul era of club goers. For generations, sampling laws have relegated these mash-ups to rich interpolation addicted pop stars, but Cobain is too indebted to his New York roots (and based on the chain he has on in this video, in a high enough tax bracket) to let them slow him down anymore.

509BMG, “Too Young To Understand”

I never know what to expect from 509BMG. He’ll rap for 11 minutes on a reggae record just to turn around and channel Flockaveli to thank Jesus. His unpredictable streak continues on “Too Young To Understand,” a grinding feardorian-produced record about seeing his first dead body as a young teen. Hushed as if he fears reawakening the corpse, he skips around over an obliterated sample of Tyler The Creator’s “Treehome95” recounting the helplessness and confusion of his innocence fading away in. The nightmares keep him up at night. He wonders what the police are around for (an evergreen thought) if they’re going to respond so slowly. In the moment, face to face with the eternal nap, he can’t rip his eyes from the body, but is still unwilling to make too big a fuss about it. “I don’t know what the n---- might have did to deserve it/Far as I know a n---- could have been a pervert.” It’s just the way it is sometimes.

Flo Milli, “She Da Shyt Freestyle”

Flo Milli, Alabama’s Bratz doll turned rap star can’t help but hate everything about everyone at all times. Coming back to the hustle and bustle of music right after maternity leave has her rocketing out barbs; “Let me admit I don’t like none of you bitches/I wish your Mom swallowed all of you bitches.” Every serrated put down she pulls from her glitter covered sleeves cuts deeper than the last. “Miss thought she was cute in whatever that shit is” is the kind of soul splitting put down crafted by a girl who spent years doing her make up in class fantasizing that day someone would try her. Don’t let it be today.

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