Lil baby too hard pitchfork
Lil baby too hard pitchfork plus#
The eyes start to glaze over already in the opening run after some of the album’s most awkward lyrics and sexual boasts on the project on “Who I Want” and a fully dead-eyed, emotionless verse from Baby plus laughably whiny, wailing vocals from Durk on “Still Hood.” But hey, their overstuffed album is catered to rack up the dollars on streaming, so it doesn’t matter to them. The next track “2040” reveals all the issues that could be easily solved if these artists simply put in the tiniest ounce of effort or care – the track easily could have been one of the better ones here with a blazing trap beat and keyboard melody and one of Lil Baby’s more energetic and unique flows in his verse, but the first of many blatantly awful mixing issues pops up when Durk takes over the second half with a fuzzy-sounding and significantly more derivative verse that sucks the energy out of the instrumental. All of this, of course, is fine if you have the charisma to back it up, but posturing themselves as messianic figures with assembly-line trap music is some serious delusions of grandeur and rather tone deaf to boot. Of course, they do add in a couple obligatory bars about experiencing pain in their earlier life necessary for the new wave of more emotional, melodic rappers. What, pray tell, do these heroic speakers do to better the world in these trying times? Deliver a couple more standardized rap flexes about material goods and women over some eerie bass piano notes and a trap beat and a chorus of despondent-sounding chanting children to artificially boost the track’s importance. The man who has constantly referred to himself as “The Voice” does once again, calling Lil Baby “The Hero” in an off-key falsetto on the chorus. The opening title track essentially lays out the album’s mission statement, hilariously promoted by Lil Durk with a Tweet reading “we just saved the world” when it dropped. While there are a couple great instrumentals that perk ears up sporadically, and Baby captures some of the momentum of his recent run of impressive features by consistently outshining Durk, both of these two have yet to produce a full-length offering that isn’t an absolute chore to sit through. It doesn’t help that the project, like many team-ups in the style, is overlong and bogged down with tracks that are largely indistinguishable from each other.
Instead of juxtaposing Durk’s more human, tangibly emotional side and somber pianos with Baby’s more energetic trap sound and warbly flows, the two attempt to find a middle ground that removes their more personal and unique aspects, continuing a streak of bland and unexciting work from each of them. Many of the greatest rap collabs in recent years have prospered due to just how diametrically opposed the two artists can be, presenting two sides or approaches to an issue that play off of each other well.
Keeping up one of the most impressive release paces in the industry as of late, Chicago Auto-crooner Lil Durk links up with one of the biggest rappers in the game, Atlanta titan Lil Baby, for an all-star collab project.