Gold Soundz 777 Jack Freaking Pot

by Sebastian Cruz, Crap at Craps

Illustration by Frances McDowell, Layout Assistant

I’ve neglected to introduce myself again and again and again across this column, as if my patrons on this continent have been doing a good job of disseminating my works across the sea to their friends, abroad and hungering for amateur new music harangues of questionable repute. Fie, little auditors, fie and shame for thine unfaith. And yet, I know you all to be clever little auditors, because you have probably deftly noticed I hid my own introduction in my account of expectations for you. I too am very very clever; if you deny it, don’t fret, not even for a moment, because I will then prove that I’m clever, by slagging off works of art that I have never listened to, will never listen to, and would advise others to do the same. 

Baby Keem - CA$INO

At this point, a convoluted, intentionally obfuscated album rollout foretells certain success for rappers (q.v. A$AP Rocky’s eight-year slow boil, Playboi Carti’s fakeouts, Kanye West’s mere existence). For a young starter like Baby Keem to fast-track indulging in these dropping-off-the-earth antics engendered in me a mix of admiration and caution, as if my first child had gone to college without even kissing me goodbye. 

Baby Keem has a deeply-carved place in my heart because of his boyish, cheeky attitude towards his fame, his entourage of ladies, and his strenuous family history. In his absence, Keem has literally put some hair on his chin and fine-tuned (and you wouldn’t believe this) a genuine, sub-40-minute concept record regarding his Las Vegas upbringing, his family business, his fatal flaws, and his insecurities that always lurked below the surface. He managed to make instant maturity feel interesting, and he still raps about getting Too Much Pootietang with usual alacrity and still says things that make no sense. We missed you, my Baby.

For fans of… Change without losing personality, the 2+ phone mindset, pretty much the entire last 15 years of popular rap and R&B.

Listen to: “Ca$ino”

skaiwater - wonderful

Consider this unfun and fruitless dilemma: can the British crib from rage music ethically? Am I even allowed to ask this as one of the least relevant demographics in music discourse (i.e. white hip-hop fans)? Ponder all of these questions and more with skaiwater’s wonderful wonderful, an album I am very glad exists, in particular because it gives me a solid pop rap diptych to contrast nicely with the shitty pop rap diptych from J. Cole and A$AP Rocky that I covered last issue. 

Along with CA$INO, skaiwater’s latest two-discer is an exercise in the new school of rap’s omnivorous attitudes towards hip-hop, pop and R&B’s history of sound. skaiwater puts together a cohesive double trouble of high-octane squeaks not dissimilar to Carti’s well-worn baby inflections with titles IN MONOSYLLABIC UPPERCASE, as well as drop-dead stunning smoother cuts with sentence-respecting lowercase and also titles from movies released in the last five years. skaiwater does the rage music just fine, but ultimately shines when their butter-smooth voice can sit pretty atop the instrumentals rather than get pinballed by the most mix-clipping 808 ever put into song. 

For fans of: Gleeful indecision, that freaky-ass good-good, Brits getting American with it (and doing it well)

Listen to: “bodies bodies bodies”

Charli xcx - Wuthering Heights 

The entire leadup to Emerald Fennell’s Charli xcx’s Emily Brontë’s The People’s Own (“)Wuthering Heights(“) truly upset my stomach. Too many cultural fixtures and touchstones who people cannot be normal about in any respect under any circumstances, including the author of this very column. This movie is the sort of 2020s pop culture amalgam that Vogue publishers dream about. 

I adamantly refuse to see Fennell’s movie, if for no other reason than the fact that I get my softcore step-sibling pornography from a local connect who I’d hate to double-cross; the novel is, from what I’ve gleaned, immaterial to the adaptation itself and thus has no bearing on this review. This leaves us with Miss ‘cx’s transmission of desire, yearning, every other synonym used and abused by AO3 acolytes, and all I want to say is that much like Jacob Elordi and his totally-really-racially-ambiguous mug, Charli feels miscast in her own music. The opulent foundation of these songs has their immersion broken by Charli’s characteristic cold, vocally-processed sheen. I’m sure this modern sleekness is metatextually relevant to Fennell’s anachronistic antics and, honestly, I’ll support any artist(s)’s attempt to really ruffle feathers in a culturally-stifled new world; just please keep it the hell away from me and my best porn-dealing friend.

For fans of… Sky Ferreira’s overheated nachos, John Cale’s sexy imprisoned old man routine, vibes-based artistry.

Listen to: “Always Everywhere”

Hilary Duff - luck… or something

I cannot be pithy here, I cannot allow myself to be overtaken by the irony I am afforded through Google Doc Anonymous Protection. I’m perfectly aware that this is a tried and true method for artistic reinvention now, the stately and mature explorations of middle aged fame and middle aged age. In this column alone, from Danny Brown to Lily James and back, I’ve mastered my approach to this kind of comeback without a hitch. I couldn’t possibly come up with a better idea for which bygone pop star would come out of the woodwork. I don’t need to hear the damn thing to know it’s a platonic ideal of the kind of album I could write about forever and still say nothing about. Duff is enuff.

For fans of… [FILL IN THE BLANK]

Listen to: [DATA EXPUNGED]

Mumford & Sons - Prizefighter 

Just kidding, I know nobody cares and if you do, you’re wrong, just wrong. An album with these chuckledicks, Hozier and Gracie Abrams feels like its own punchline. Hozier is, ostensibly, supposed to be a real artist and thus any association with Mumford and fucking Sons automatically disproves such a claim; and any progeny of J. J. Abrams is no artist of mine.

For fans of… The sound of one hand clapping, a tree falling with nobody around, Gracie Abrams /gen.

Listen to: *long drawn-out fart*

BONUS!!!: Lana Del Rey - “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter”

She’s really out of her goddamn mind, isn’t she? This is as complimentary as I can get, since Lana has been making an absolute meal out of being completely bizarre in every way she can manage. I feel this odd urge to actually interface with this song in earnest, but Lana has made it an unconscionable task. It feels perfectly-designed to get under my skin specifically: soft baby coo raps about how she loves her husband’s John Deere tractor (how’s that for a tortured dick metaphor, T-Swizz?). The polite orchestration that seems to be accompanying a Nutracker-esque performance of this story. The chorus which I invite you to view right now, drop everything including this newspaper and just look at it because I couldn’t believe my senses. Lana is the king of the beasts, and she will kill to eat. Or, put another way, I am compelled against my will. 

For fans of… Cultural conservatism chic, Del Rey’s “A&W” with a fraction of the self-awareness, unforgivable pet names.