Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, weird tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention.
Law & Order: SVU is propagating dangerous rap stereotypes
Currently in its 23rd season, Law & Order: SVU is an essential part of producer Dick Wolf’s respect-the-uniform multiverse, a mostly mindless cop procedural made to be binged by people who are on a sick day from work. For a while now, they’ve been trying to inject more progressive conversations into the show, but they haven’t quite figured it out. This was made especially clear on last week’s episode “Nightmares in Drill City,” where the detectives piece together a crime using lyrics by made-up Brooklyn drill rappers.
The idea of the police and courts using a rapper’s lyrics against them is nothing new, and recent cases against Drakeo the Ruler, YoungBoy, and YNW Melly show it’s still a common practice. SVU follows this trend by flattening drill rap for dramatic effect, ignoring the idea that the genre, like most other types of art, often involves blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Taking every lyric at face value doesn’t make sense, but they don’t care.
“Nightmares in Drill City” opens with a white high school honor student named Tori hanging out with Gutta, a Brooklyn drill rapper looking to settle a beef. Gutta wants to rob rival rapper Milly2k because he apparently called out Gutta and his crew on a track by saying they’re “nobodies trying to be somebodies.” On the scale of drill disses, that is relatively minor. Gutta is pretty sensitive.
We get to see clips of Milly2k rapping. It’s not good, but I’m not sure the show knows that. He sounds like a worse version of 2019 Fivio Foreign, down to the “bow” ad-libs and stop-start flow. If Gutta were smarter, he just would have laid down a diss record of his own pointing out how shitty Milly2k is. I bet everyone would have agreed. But no, he would rather get himself implicated in a crime. It’s set up by Tori and goes wrong when Milly2k is killed by Gutta. Later, a frazzled Tori points the SVU detectives in the direction of Gutta’s popping YouTube channel.
Now Ice-T is on the case. (Side note: Does anybody actually know Ice-T’s character’s name? I petition that the show start calling him “Ice-T.” I doubt viewers would even notice.) “The music’s called drill. It’s made famous by Chief Keef out of Chicago. It spread everywhere,” Ice-T explains to the assistant district attorney, like he’s been binge-watching the Melz TV YouTube channel. In disgust, they watch Gutta’s videos together. They really hate it, and I can’t blame them. Gutta’s music might be worse than Milly2k’s, even though he’s also a 2019 Fivio Foreign ripoff.
(Why does everyone in Law & Order: SVU’s Brooklyn drill scene sound like Fivio? I have some theories: 1) Dick Wolf rides for Donda and ordered an episode be made about the dude on “Off the Grid,” 2) SVU takes place in an alternate universe where Earth is overrun by Fivio clones, or, most realistically, 3) Fivio’s flow was the easiest to recreate .)
Anyway, while they’re watching Gutta’s video, a new one drops where Gutta gives a play-by-play of the robbery and even flashes a stolen chain. “These kids are clout chasing,” Ice-T says. “The dummies wanna be famous so bad they’re doing our jobs for us.” Did Dick Wolf hire DJ Akademiks to ghostwrite this?
“Real Life” is a somber trap song from Dolph’s most consistent tape, 2016’s King of Memphis. The chorus is particularly great, where he barks, “I ain’t wanted nothin’ in my whole life but some fucking money,” sounding completely drained. It takes a lot out of him to even think about all the hurdles he had to leap to get to a point of being comfortable.
Young Dolph had a knack for making a few words endlessly loop in my head. Around the time Rich Slave came out last year, it was the words “hold up, hold up, hold up” from the intro track of the same name. The downbeat instrumental shapes the mood by making his flexes feel less like bragging and more a sigh of relief.
The relationship Dolph built with fellow Memphis rapper and younger cousin Key Glock on the Dum and Dummer series was a good one. They complemented each other well, and both volumes are bright spots in Dolph’s catalog. “If I Ever,” from the first tape, is the one I go back to the most. Dolph and Key are having so much fun just trying to get in the best lines they can over the hypnotic beat. Dolph wins out, though. “My watch beefin’ with my chain, and I’m the instigator,” he starts casually, as if what he just said wasn’t so damn cool. To Dolph it was just another line.
Bandmanrill: “Tonight’s Da Night Freestyle”
Newark, New Jersey is one of the pivotal music cities on the East Coast. It’s been a home to jazz for many years; it’s where Jersey club originated; it’s the city that New York rappers go to perform when they start to get big. Bandmanrill is trying to spearhead a new movement in Newark, and he’s got it popping with four consecutive singles where he lays drill flows over kinetic Jersey club beats (his latest one is a homage to his city).
To further his status as a hometown hero, Bandmanrill dropped a freestyle over “Tonight’s Da Night,” an essential track from Newark legend Redman’s 1992 debut. Over the timeless Erick Sermon beat, Bandmanrill’s delivery drips with cockiness as he effortlessly reps his area: “Look I’m from Jersey, you gon’ rap or grab a jersey/You gon’ step up in them streets and you decide you think it’s worthy.” Newark should be proud.
In praise of dltzk’s insane mid-song fireworks
I’ve gotten so accustomed to 90-second PinkPantheress singles and 50-second Shawny Binladen tracks on YouTube that staring down some of the six-minute-plus tracks on teenage digicore artist dltzk’s debut album frailty seemed overwhelming. Especially considering that these aren’t six minutes of vibes, but of extremely dense and layered instrumentation, samples, and vocals. But the more I listen to the record, the longer I want the evershifting songs to keep going. My favorite sections of the tracks are usually in the middle, where they’re suddenly stripped down, or when a drop leads to a moment of mayhem. Here are a few of the album’s best left turns.
I imagine self-destructing would sound like the blitz of synths and beats that breaks this song in half starting at the two-and-a-half minute mark.
It hurts my brain to think about the amount of thought that went into this song; there’s so much detail and intention behind every second. A couple of minutes in, as dltzk stoically coos, what sounds like crickets chirping and a nail methodically being hammered enter the fray. It’s both hypnotic and easy to miss.
One minute and 29 seconds in, the track suddenly moves from this moody slow build to what feels like standing in front of a jet engine to a jagged breakbeat that Aphex Twin could appreciate. It’s breathtaking.
This year, YL used his mixtapes to branch out, debuting a breathless delivery on June’s It Never Entered My Mind and September’s Adaptation. His latest tape, Soda Club, goes further, dropping the smoky loops of his previous work for pounding instrumentals by an all-star team of New York and New Jersey underground staples. A highlight from the tape, “Choke No Joke,” embraces these new changes and is better for it. Produced by Subjxct 5 and Roper Williams, the beat consists of thudding drums laid over a soothing vocal sample, and YL breezes through with flexes that mix in random pop culture name drops: Cousin Skeeter, Anita Baker, Kermit the Frog. All of his risks are paying off right now.
Ace Cino: “2 Different Models”
The only predictable element of an Ace Cino track is the Meadow Soprano clip that opens every song. For some time now, the Michigan rapper has been bouncing between traditional cold, Detroit-based street rap and records where he submerges his vocals in Auto-Tune and gets into his feels. He once again moves into new territory on his latest single, “2 Different Models,” deciding to simply whisper under its groovy, piano-driven beat. The idea may sound gimmicky, but this song is more mesmerizing than anything else he’s made.
