Records like DR2 aren’t just distractions, they’re sonic power washers blasting out whatever psychic residue you have gunking up the corners of your brain. Flocka’s admission early on that he rapped primarily for the checks and not because he considered himself an artist sent up howls from hip-hop’s more serious corners.īut if Waka Flocka Flame has lowered the standards for writing in the rap world- and the wave of poetry-averse Flockaveli fans that make up the Chicago drill scene, for instance, suggests that he has- he’s made up for it by introducing a level of catharsis that it had rarely achieved before. It also, as many of his critics complained, dealt a considerable blow to the notion of that good rappers need to be good writers, which had already been weakened by a generation of Southern rappers who were less interested in competing with Northerners lyrically than economically.
That album not only made him a star, but also made teen production wizard Lex Luger one as well, and helped solidify the modern trap sound’s stranglehold on mainstream hip-hop.
On DR2’s spoken word intro Flocka boasts, among other things, that when he dropped Flockaveli back in 2010 that “hip-hop changed,” and it’s hard to argue with him. The pleasure that I take in listening to DuFlocka Rant 2 is less like what I get from the usual mixtape and more like why I love certain strains of extreme metal, where the gratification comes from surrendering to the onslaught, and letting yourself be obliterated as it passes over you and through you. This kind of insistence upon your attention is normally a turnoff, but Flocka makes a compelling case for letting him dominate your senses. Trying to ignore it in any way is hopeless. Each track on DuFlocka Rant 2 fills every available nook and cranny of the audible spectrum with noise and chaos. Hence the throat-shredding scream-raps (sometimes layered two or three deep) suspended in a matrix of frame-rattling bass, flickering hi-hats, and anxiety-inducing one-bar synth loops that form the foundation of Flocka’s aesthetic.
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