One factor that at all times irritated me about Malcolm Gladwell’s silly 10,000-hour rule is that I can not think about doing something for 10,000 hours with out having a lot of the pleasure sucked out of the expertise. What you achieve in experience, you lose in shock. Perhaps in the event you turn out to be proficient in enjoying the saxophone you’ll be able to learn to experiment, however there isn’t any such alternative once you’ve spent your 10,000-plus hours listening to rap music. And with out that means to be stunned and swept up by one thing, you’ll be able to overlook how joyful music, notably rap, might be.
#Gigi, the brand new album from the 23-year-old rapper and producer Skaiwater, put me beneath its spell, regardless of my unreal means to withstand such issues. There’s nothing utterly model new about Skaiwater—there’s items of Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti, and Skaiwater broadly suits inside that area of interest of club-meets-emo rap alongside Slizzy gang aficionados Money Cobain and Chow Lee. Like each Soundcloud rapper earlier than them, these artists had been clearly simply as influenced by Paramore and The Postal Service as they had been Drake and Nicki Minaj.
What’s spectacular about Skaiwater and #Gigi particularly is how effectively and seamlessly the album combines Jersey membership, techno, cloud rap, emo rock, and R&B into one potent stew. Even that description is promoting it a bit quick. There are additional elements to be discovered on a track like “play,” which makes use of New Orleans bounce, or “richest woman alive,” the place Skaiwater calls themselves the richest woman alive over a beat that will sound at residence in a Florida jook playlist. “Shut up and drive,” in the event you take the rapping off it, appears like a loosie from Give Up. #Gigi appears to drag threads from the whole historical past of music, and by some means all these bits and items and samples resolve into one thing not simply coherent, however magical.
Music at its greatest ought to make you are feeling one thing, and I might grown comfy with out feeling, substituting intellectualizing as a replacement—like a man who tells you a joke is genuinely very humorous regardless of by no means truly laughing. The sensation is available in spurts and begins—there are nonetheless songs that join on that degree, however hardly ever complete tasks. Skaiwater’s “rain” may need given me the most effective feeling I’ve skilled all yr in slightly below three minutes, a euphoric hit that matches its angelic piano notes and woozy, drunken autotune warble. This track could be essentially the most indebted to somebody like Carti, who I’ve expressed my appreciation for, however it transcends mere imitation to one thing extra private and religious. Whereas “rain” is the plain standout from the album, the whole mission manages to attain one thing primal within the listener that no different album, not to mention rap album, has been in a position to do persistently.
A lot of rap music this yr has felt like an argument for returning to 2012. We’ve got a brand new Schoolboy Q album, and Kendrick Lamar rapping over Mustard beats, and Future making an attempt to recreate the magic of his mixtape run. I get it. It is onerous to look to any sort of future proper now, however no less than somebody is making an attempt. I am far more all for Skaiwater’s image of the long run than I’m in anybody else’s of the previous.