Casual blasphemy: DJ Premier has always been better with his scratch hooks than his actual beats. He’s never had to be flashy because his sense of timing is so perfect, transforming short snippets of classic accapellas into earworms that stick like melodies. His production work is a mixed bag, but his hook game? An unbroken winning streak that shaped the genre.
That said, “Infinite” is not even a footnote in that legacy. Yet it’s also huge-ass moment for Alabama rapper Henri, a proper animated music video for a big single with an implicit co-sign. As a rap song over a Preemo beat, it does everything right. The samples are bright & catchy, the drums are simple & slamming, and the hook is pure NYC boom bap shit. The only problem is, every ten seconds or so, you get reminded how inescapably corny this kind of fan art always is.
Henri is an competent rapper but an inferior writer. His studied rasp could cut through in any cypher, but his bar game is too formulaic to make much impression doing it. Immortalizing those bars into black and white animation only further emphasizes how lightweight he is, both as a technician and as an entertainer. His reverence for the culture is all he has to offer.
That’s not necessarily a problem, after all: J. Cole. Macklemore. Big Sean. There’s a whole pantheon of guys like this and they’re all making money doing it. The only question is whether you want to live your one & only life with some real dignity.
It will be interesting see how this cat evolves. Statistically, that won’t happen, but I like to be surprised. Hopefully he loosens up and leans into who he really is; almost anyone who was “born in Germany” and wound up in Huntsville comes from a spook-adjacent family and has a fair few stories to tell. You don’t need to laundry list your bonafides, just show and prove with what’s truly yours. At the very least, write less boring similies and more interesting rhyme schemes.
Free advice from the cheap seats, and worth every penny. There will always be a mass audience that thinks “buzzing like a bumble bee” is acceptable craftsmanship, and having checked out a few of his other songs, most of the Henri catalog comes off as ESL rap, the kind of try-hard true-school tributes that Polish and Japanese dudes post up on Soundcloud every day. They have no ear for the idioms that run beneath the artform and never will. They are tourists, wearing costumes.
This tourist has a budget, though. Henri already has Fat Beats in his corner and nobody reads blogs in 2026. But what’s the point of a punchline rapper who is neither clever nor funny? And how could anyone who claims Del the Funky Homosapien as an influence be so bland on the mic? Three Dickies, but only because all of this represents so much honest work. Beneath all that, there’s just nothing much there.
