Lil Tjay has been unavoidable for a very long time now. I still managed to ignore him until 2022, when he linked up with 802 rapper/singer North Ave Jax for his “Eastside” remix. (That was thanks to Love, Kelly – director, promoter, designer, and cultural force the world has yet to see the full extent of.) As with so many other big names over the past decade that I finally got around to actually listening to, I was under-fucking-whelmed.
So we have to start with the fact that he doesn’t have to be that great in order to be successful. After all, this kid has been playing a different game than 99% of his competitors: he’s been signed to Columbia for almost a decade now. Like any other legacy label that’s still around in 2026, that brand is basically a skinsuit for the Sony Music empire, with all the bot farms, publicist plugs and actual budgets that entails.
Since his 2018 debut, he’s only released three actual albums, but his generation doesn’t really use LPs as a unit of measurement anymore. What his team optimizes for is buzz & clout. He tours regularly and he has at least one single charting any given fiscal quarter, often alongside A-List names like Ice Spice, Lil Baby or French Montana. The point is to stay visible at all costs.
“Amazing Years” is his most recent offering, and it’s a welcome break from club anthems or boring brags. The opening verse is a strong testimony, albeit delivered with the same drugged-out non-enunciation that defines this whole wave of “an artist not a rapper” type mystery meat. He ain’t a sharp lyricist but he patterns his bars with a nod to the NYC true school he grew up around. On behalf of the Boom Bap Dinosaurs Guild, the gesture is appreciated.
The first-draft weakness of his pen game really snaps into focus once he starts singing, strangely enough. The hook here is god-awful, and once he leans into simply caterwauling his feelings, I was reminded of MC Baba. He’s a Congolese artist who went viral for about 24 hours for being “The World’s First Deaf Rapper™” (can I get a fact check on Aisle Seven?). He doesn’t rap or sing so much as dolphin-shout over beats; more than merely terrible, it is viscerally disturbing.
Lil Tjay is only “merely terrible” in the booth, fortunately. If his team really loved him, surely they would have vetoed this crap, or at least asked him to try a couple takes that hit actual notes.
I’m kidding, of course, because the joke is on me and anyone else who expects certain standards to be upheld here in the Kali Yuga. Everything gets exponentially worse from here, but complaints are beside the point; this is a larger generational & seismic shift. Fans of Jay-Z were entranced by a master craftsman who operated at a level they could only aspire to reach themselves. The appeal of artists like Lil Tjay is that they’re exactly like their audience, so relatable precisely because they’re so mediocre. The only difference is they worked hard and they got lucky.
The dream they’re all selling is that you could get lucky, too, and there is a certain truth to that. You can’t get distracted by raw numbers or objective facts when you’re betting on yourself. You have to be absolutely delusional, every day, for years, to pursue that spotlight. That’s one aspect of the music business that will never change.
So despite all my contempt, between the actual raps, the tasteful black and white video, and the basic human desire to root for someone who survived a murder attempt, I can’t go any lower than Two Dickies. Let this little dipshit cook. He has surely earned it.
