YS, “Still Love Me” f/ Lefty Gunplay
There’s barely anything holding up the beat on YS and Lefty Gunplay’s “Still Love Me.” A few lonely xylophone notes ping around in the background as Lefty, the Baldwin Park rapper who broke nationally after popping up on Kendrick Lamar’s “TV Off,” turns existential relationship anxiety into a hook simple enough to get stuck immediately: “If I lost it all today would you still love me?/If I wasn’t so famous would you still fuck me?”
For Lefty, the question isn’t entirely hypothetical. He grew up broke in a trailer park with his mom and grandma, and here he remembers falling asleep to the sound of police sirens outside. His life has changed dramatically, but “Still Love Me” is preoccupied with which parts of it would disappear if the money and attention did too. Lefty’s clipped, staccato delivery keeps any of this from getting syrupy. He spits it out almost matter-of-factly, like there isn’t enough time between xylophone plinks to feel sorry for himself.
YS slides into the same pocket, matching Lefty’s stop-start cadence while turning the song’s central question into a loyalty test: “If I couldn’t reach for my blam, would you up pole?” It’s a love song where devotion is measured through increasingly bleak contingencies, yet the sparseness leaves it strangely light on its feet. The video is even more minimal, mostly grainy footage recycled from what look like other shoots, giving the whole thing the energy of someone realizing they still need a visual at 11:47 p.m. The paranoia barely needs dressing up.
Prince Swanny, “BussHead”
Twenty-eight-year-old Prince Swanny can’t go home anymore. He hails from Trinidad, the larger of the two islands that make up Trinidad and Tobago, but is currently in Florida after being granted asylum over safety concerns. He alleges that police back home harassed him and his family, regularly slashing his tires and threatening his life.
That context makes the disclaimer opening the “BussHead” video even more poignant. Swanny and his team say the video was recorded one or two years ago and, amid calls for peace, they had no plans to release it. But when someone threatened to leak the footage, which Swanny says was intended to push a false narrative and incite further hostility, they put it out themselves with a warning that what follows is entertainment, not a call for violence or unrest.
Troubles do not make a man, though. Prince Swanny sounds vivacious and slick, flashing a charming smile and rapping in a Creole-inflected accent that makes anything he says sound cool. It’s one of the catchiest dancehall songs in years, powered by a thunderous beat that still glitters with island dew. Swanny flutters between registers with a disarmingly fluid flow, never losing his balance through the massive tonal shifts. He raps about custom grips for his guns, the feds tapping his line, and other fairly standard fare for modern rap, but the threats arrive with such ease that the song remains breezy and even bordering on celebratory.
Ralfy The Plug, “Baccarat” f/ Remble
Other than videos of cats playing instruments at 4 a.m., this may be the first AI-generated video I’ve genuinely enjoyed. Ralfy the Plug has been on an absolute heater lately, and there’s not a single skip on his latest album, LS vs. AMG. “Baccarat” is one of the standouts, with Ralfy and Remble taking turns flexing and dismissing their opponents through the kind of grievances Larry David might have if Larry David carried a chop.
The video takes basically every bar at face value. When Ralfy says his dick is the bomb like Pakistan, he suddenly appears in a turban. His face materializes inside a chalupa. He cruises around holding actual chopsticks. When he says an opponent can’t hoop with them, he repeatedly dunks on the guy. There’s an intense kung fu fight. At one point he calls an opp a tap dancer because the gunfire has him doing happy feet. It’s all stupid, funny, and hard as hell.
Better yet, whatever AI tool made this thing has absolutely no idea what Remble looks like. An animated guy who appears to be Ralfy’s opponent keeps popping up throughout the video, only for that same guy to suddenly start rapping when Remble’s verse begins. There is no continuity, no internal logic, and apparently no character bible. You spend half the video thinking, “Damn, Ralfy really hates this dude,” before realizing, oh wait, that’s supposed to be Remble. The continuity error ends up being one of the funniest jokes in a video full of them.
BossMan Dlow, “Intro”
BossMan Dlow is all presence and delivery. Like Prince Swanny, he has one of those voices that makes everything sound cool. He could rap about sorting laundry and I’d probably tell you it was a certified club banger. On Intro, he’s carrying a goat and mimicking its baaas before the song even starts. The goat baas back and Dlow answers with a delighted “wooooh,” wearing the satisfied smile of a man who just received an endorsement from another GOAT.
The beat thumps beneath subtle, racing synth keys, and Dlow starts teeing off, dangling his diamond chains and flashing his iced-out grill while explaining why your operation simply does not compare to his. “Your trap ain’t doing nothin’ like Chick-fil-A on Sunday,” he raps, then keeps finding stranger ways to quantify how rich he is. He drives Rolls-Royces like Acuras, has so much money he doesn’t know how to act “just like a Tubi movie,” and eventually christens himself Dlow Wembanyama because he can’t be guarded [Harley note: Yes he can, just ask KAT].
When he raps, “It’s rules to this shit when it comes to bossing up,” it clicked for me that his entire ethos is basically a corporate leadership coach. His advice? Stay on top (generic), stay humble (also generic), keep people out of your business (I guess also generic), and when necessary, spend $200,000 switching your teeth out. By the end of the song, he’s just talking shit about walking into dealerships with cash and waking up to count $600,000. Every word is gospel.
Spark, “I’m Good” f/ 2KYayo
The influence of Nino Paid cannot be denied here. SparkTheGreat and 2KYayo tap into that same bruised, diaristic style on “I’m Good,” rapping their 3 a.m. paranoid thought spirals. It’s hard to substantiate exactly where either rapper is from, but context clues point toward Florida. Beneath them is a downtrodden, foggy beat anchored by Julie Doiron’s ghostly “Will you still love me in December?” refrain. Both rappers keep returning to “I’m good” after spending their verses explaining, in considerable detail, why they aren’t.
Spark opens awake at three in the morning, imagining increasingly grim scenarios before remembering he has work in the morning. It’s a darkly funny intrusion of everyday responsibility into a verse that keeps flirting with the abyss. He calls himself “a paper bag floating through wind,” talks about fighting suicidal thoughts, then points out that he has half a lung and is still breathing. For all the despair, there’s a stubborn little pulse running through the song.
2KYayo takes it from there, getting into anxiety, grief, isolation and the humiliation of letting anybody see how badly you’re doing. “Life knocking me down, but I keep getting up” basically sums up the whole thing. By the time both rappers land on “I’m good,” the phrase rings a little hollow after everything they’ve just admitted. But it works for them, so maybe the manifestation girlies were right all along.