Super Slimey, by Future & Young Thug
Suggested by Jamie Walsh
There’s a subset of Suggesters who believe that the Randomiser hates them.
As we breach the walls of Album 200, there are seventeen noble folk who have suggested albums but have yet to feel the Randomiser’s light strike their supine face. One might look to poor Tom, with thirteen suggestions unsniffed, but as my wife Sarah has yet to be chosen – which she mentions on the hour, every hour – I believe the real sympathy lies with yours truly.
Sarah’s current omission is not the only sign that the Randomiser hates me too. Coming into this project as a fresh-faced summer child, I imagined myself hitting milestones and reviewing classic albums, holding court and waxing lyrical about The Rolling Stones or The Beatles as the counter clicked to 100.
The reality is much different. I must have been a bad man in a previous life, because here I am, at Album 200, reviewing Another Bloody Rap Album.
This time, it’s the turn of rap collaborators Future and Young Thug to step up to the mic with their signature style. And their signature style? Incomprehensible speedy rhymes centred on the realities of an urban rapper lifestyle, over pulsing bass and snap-snare drumbeats. That’s right, their “signature style” is ninety percent the same as everyone else in the fabled Game.
There is a pair of issues that do make both Future and his compatriot Young Thug stand out from the pack. The first is that they both use a copious amount of autotune to modulate their delivery and timbre. To me, this is an indication that they’re just bad at their jobs, but okay, I guess it’s there by design. The second issue, which is by far the more serious, is that even by rap standards both Future and Young Thug are completely unintelligible. The autotune doesn’t help, and nor does the vernacular, but the real issue is their deliberately laid-back and almost mumbled delivery.
I tried my best, believe me. My streaming service of choice has a lyric function, and I read / rapped along with the boys like some hideous karaoke dad trying to be cool at his son’s fourteenth birthday party. But even when I could see the words, the themes and references were still far too oblique to take anything but a surface understanding. Even the songs I enjoyed, like Killed Before, Mink Flow or my standout Cruise Ship saw meaning breeze by me, like a county-level marathon runner blasting past a fat grandad journeyman dressed as a hippo.
Super Slimey gets a not-so-super 4/10, partially because the Randomiser keeps thrusting this genre down my throat as if I need a rap tracheotomy. There’s doubtless a far few similar albums to come, and I’ll bet their Suggesters are feeling pensive. I hope, for their sakes, the Randomiser takes a break from the hip hop backbeat, lest I mentally snap and hoof this project into the sea.