“Every white rapper is the whole of the white rappers that came before them, because when there are so few of you, it becomes easy to avoid falling into the same patterns.” Abdurraqib traces the lineage from Vanilla Ice to Eminem to rock-star-esque Cleveland phenom Machine Gun Kelly (probably G-Eazy’s closest stylistic analogue) to uber-preppy also-ran Asher Roth to Macklemore, who in a few short years as a pop supernova turned white privilege (and white guilt) from his subtext to his very explicit text. “But the joke is this,” writes poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib in “The White Rapper Joke,” a highlight of his fantastic new essay collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. One thing G-Eazy doesn’t rap about much, at least these days, is his race, which is some combination of an inevitability, a relief, and a red flag. There are other things to talk about, but he’d rather not talk about them, and I’m not convinced you want him to talk about them either. (“Try, but it all falls down like Tetris / No telling where that 80-proof gets us.”) What a time to be dead inside. “Pray for Me” has a similarly dead-eyed ad nauseum hook of “Pray for me / Pray for me / Pray for me / Pray for me” “Sober,” with its yelping Charlie Puth hook and shout-outs to Kobe Bryant and Jim Morrison, celebrates G-Eazy’s sex life as a byproduct of his problem drinking. Think of it as a bargain-basement version of Drake’s Views with way less toxic resentment but also way less, y’know, craft. But per the cover image, most of this album is far darker and grimmer, exploring the ways all that money and fame has warped and isolated Young Gerald. “No Limit” is the best song on The Beautiful & Damned, if only for the more animating presence of both A$AP Rocky (whose hook harkens back to his far superior 2013 hit “Fuckin’ Problems”) and Cardi B (“Can you stop with all the subs? / Bitch, I ain’t Jared”).
vRqP3x0O9X- Al Shipley December 12, 2017
(Please note the resplendent Inspector Gadget coat.) If you ever find yourself in a hotel room next door to these two, I recommend you switch to a different hotel across town. The Beautiful & Damned has landed two prerelease singles in the upper reaches of the Hot 100, including “Him & I,” a sultry duet with his girlfriend, Halsey, which they performed this week on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He is a better rapper now than he was in 2014, when his breakout album, These Things Happen, yielded cringy hits like “I Mean It” and “Tumblr Girls,” which has a disconcertingly lovely beat marred by such fake-deep lyrical boners as “She said she can’t feel her face / Right now I can’t feel my heart.” G-Eazy has little to talk about other than his bad-boy status, the bad-girl status of his various paramours, and the improbably flourishing pop stardom his fealty to these topics has brought him. In an alarmingly homogenized pop-radio landscape - where each and every new hit is a soothing puree of trap, EDM, noirish R&B, and capitalist indie quirk - his workmanlike voice, neither too clunky nor too distinct, fits in without standing out.
I am only slightly trolling when I suggest that Eminem’s Revival might not even be the biggest album by a white rapper coming out this week.īorn Gerald Earl Gillum, G-Eazy specializes in Top 40 duets with maximally ethereal female vocalists, from the 2016 Britney Spears comeback bid “Make Me…” to his double bill with Kehlani on the Fate of the Furious soundtrack jam “Good Life.” Most prominently, there is 2015’s Bebe Rexha teamup “Me, Myself & I,” a moody ode to solitude and solipsism that cracked the Top 10 and might even rank among the top-five songs with that title. He is Evil Agent Cooper he is darkest-timeline Macklemore. On the striking cover of his third major-label album, The Beautiful & Damned, his pretty face is going to hell, battered and bruised, with bloodstains all along the collar of his white T-shirt. He is nearly 6 1/2 feet tall, with slicked-back jet-black hair to better accentuate his black leather jacket. The doomed matinee idol, the dolorous hedonist, the wayward dreamboat. Think of G-Eazy, the Oakland rapper and improbably flourishing pop star, as the sort of melodramatic bad boy Lana Del Rey is always writing songs about.