What the world needs right now is a catchy club song about catching STDs. Just in time for summer, here it is. Back when A Boogie Wit da Hoodie was just getting started, I remember getting some publicist pitch about the rigorous “training program” he used to prepare for his rap career. We used to call that “practice.” We didn’t make a huge deal about doing it, either. That’s just the job description: get good.
Old man grumbling aside, it is encouraging to see that producers within the industry would treat young artists like a boxing prospect and put them in the studio for 8 to 10 hour work shifts, day after day. That’s how TDE management honed their human weapons, and that dojo has shaped the past decade.
The key question here is what, precisely, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie was practicing. Schoolboy Q and Ab-Soul came out of their training program as more complete, polished versions of themselves. This dude was only imitating other people. He’s been a chameleon his whole career, which is both a compliment and a condemnation. Like so many other young artists who are rapping to get famous instead of becoming great, there is almost nothing in his catalog that is truly his.
“Body” is both terrible and perfect. If you think that Fat Joe’s club hits were too sellout to be hip hop, you’re too much of a wine snob to break bread at my table. I don’t like that shit, either, but I’m not creating some personal parallel history of rap music out of spite. Few genres have been shaped by other genres more than ours. This is a blender with damn near everthing in it, even Johnny Cash & Thelonious Monk. All of this warbling Antares bullshit has been the future ever since Kraftwerk cut that first LP in 1970. Our destiny was set before we were born.
Cash Cobain steals the show with his feature, but that’s mostly because the bar is set so low. Presumably he recorded his verse, a straight-up love sonnet, before the hook was laid down. Either way, the contrast between the “let’s bang tonight” chorus and his “I would die for you” sixteen provides the only comedy here, and it was purely accidental.
Just yesterday, we were talking about how perfection can be boring. Old boy doesn’t make a single wrong move here, but that is exactly why the product is so underwhelming. These poses and cues have been hit by ten thousand model/actor types now, and nothing here is new or funny enough to change that. Ghostface just delivered an LP full of 2 am bangers for the ladies and all of them were brazen, hilarious shit. This here is just another high fidelity photocopy.
We could forgive this kind of gimp wank back when gas was cheap and the dollar was strong, but those days are dead. It is 2024 and this world is on motherfucking fire. Do not waste our time. This is competent, professional, and vapid as fuck. I respect the craftsmanship, but the rest is vanity. One Dicky.
