Posted by We’re in the dog days of summer now folks. Every artist is trying to drop some heat to coincide with the remaining heat of the season. We’ve got songs from big players like Swae Lee, Drake, Taylor Swift and Young Thug, but also some bangers from newer artists like Ashe and Doja Cat. All that plus an update on Mike Posner’s walk across America, we debate if Drake’s lost his edge, Vince Staples has a new tv show coming out that looks good, and we talk about the best song from a movie soundtrack. Check all that out below and let me know whatchall think.
What’s Good?
“Juicy” -Doja Cat & Tyga
VIDEO IS NSFW, AN AUDIO ONLY VIDEO IS NOT ON YOUTUBE
I hate how much I love this song but I am fully addicted. Doja Cat is an interesting character. From her infamous song “Moo” which provided these iconic lyrics,
to her old tweets surfacing revealing she used homophobic slurs, I’m hesitant to say I enjoy this song. But, she’s clearly got a big personality and her beat selection is prime. Even the production on “Moo” is smooth as hell, so this more bouncy-pop-trap beat along with her light-hearted lyrics makes for an absolute banger. Haven’t had a good anthem about having a fat ass in a while and she filled that void. Not to mention the comeback artist of the past few years Tyga tosses a fun accompanying verse on the track. Just a great time and worth throwing on at a party/pre-game over the next few weeks.
“Shawty” -Remi Wolf
Not to loop these in together, but if you liked the last song you’ll probably like this one too. Another female hip-hop artist rapping/singing over a wicked fun bubbly beat with a catchy as hell chorus. Something to definitely check out if you’re looking for some upbeat fun nonsense to carry you through the day.
Sidenote on this one, can we bring back calling someone you’re romantically involved with “shawty”? I think the last time it was used unironically outside of song lyrics was when I was in like 4th grade and Akon was all over the radio. Little 10 year old me didn’t have a girl to call shawty till he became a smokin hot 5th grader. That year before puberty was peak hotness for me. I missed my window. So, if we all get behind it, let’s bring back shawty for the end of 2019 and hope it carries into 2020. Summer’s almost over, and you know what that means: it’s almost time to find yourself a significant other to relieve the seasonal depression of the winter. This is normally referred to as “cuffing season”, but let’s band together and make it “shawty szn”, shall we?
“Friends” -Big Gigantic feat. Ashe
Big Gigantic has a pretty great reputation in the EDM community for being one of the genre’s best artists for a pretty long time. So of course when they drop a new song with palm trees on the cover and featuring the newest dance-music-vocalist Ashe to it, it’s gonna be heat. This song has that really cool futuristically funky sound that I LOVE. It sounds a lot like Party Pupils who are one of my favorite newer artists who also made a song with Ashe, and I’m not mad about it. The horns on the drop along with a great melody from Ashe make this a must listen for any electronic fans.
“What’s The Move?” -Young Thug feat. Lil Uzi Vert
Lil Uzi Vert and Young Thug are kind of in the same boat for me. I’m not going to go deep into their albums or downloading a ton of their music, but when they have a banger I am THERE. This song is exactly one of those bangers. Really fun poppy beat and a great collab between the two just having fun sending verses back and forth. But this isn’t the energy I’d say is spread throughout the whole project.
For an album titled “So Much Fun” this album isn’t nearly as fun as you’d expect. I’m sure it was “so much fun” for Young Thug (a rich and famous superstar) to make it, I mean, look at this music video for his song with Gunna.
Having a squirt gun war on the beach while riding on ATV’s with a bunch of models? Yeah, that seems like a shit ton of fun thugger BUT NOT FOR ME. I’m sitting at my desk looking at Google Sheets ok. This song doesn’t make me want to close out all my tabs and start dancing like a true fun song would. It’s just you repeating a lot of words over a boring factory-made trap beat.
Admittedly, I’m not the biggest Young Thug guy. I respect what he’s done and like his hits for sure, but I’m not nearly as much of a stan as a lot of people. I don’t think this album is bad necessarily, but I don’t think it’s anything special mostly due to the production.
Thugger has such a cool voice, he’s got a wild sense of style, and a big personality, so why does he choose these boring ass beats for a ton of his songs? He’s just taking meat and potato beats that anyone could find by searching “Young Thug Type Beat” on youtube and rapping over it. It’s frustrating because he kills it when he switches up his beats. When he flipped “Rocketman” for “High” it was awesome! When he went in over a more EDM Jamie XX beat on “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” it was UNREAL. Even his verses on Calvin Harris’ “Heatstroke” were FIRE. So it’s annoying knowing this guy who has access to any producer he wants and has a great creative vision is just picking the first beats he gets sent to him and rapping generic shit over it because he knows it’ll sell no matter what.
There’s good songs on this for sure, but at 19 tracks and having half of them be nothing special I wouldn’t say it’s going to be anywhere near the top albums of the year list, at least for me.
“Won’t Be Late” -Swae Lee feat. Drake
I hate to say it, but after listening to this and seeing the reactions I can’t help but wonder, is Drake losing his edge?
Remember, the title of this portion of the blog is “What’s Good?” not “What’s GREAT”. I liked this song. Of course I did. It’s Swae Lee and Drake, two of the biggest stars in the hip-hop game right now. Both of them nail that Caribbean sound so perfectly it was impossible for this song to flop, but it didn’t live up to the hype in my opinion.
When people found out they had a new song coming twitter went wild. Saying there’s gonna be a new #1 song record sorry Old Town Road! and stuff, but then when it dropped I saw very little reaction to it. Why? I think because it’s exactly what people expected. A fun beat with more “One Dance”/”Guatemala” vibes and some fun sing-y verses from Swae Lee and Drizzy. It’s what we were all picturing.
You know what song did end up dethroning “Old Town Road” though? Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy”. Why? Because it’s an extremely original song. It has such a weird sound and the structure is different and it’s from an exciting new artist. I think you can say the same for “Old Town Road” and Lil Nas X. Does Drake have it in him to compete against these guys? He hasn’t really had a mega mega hit since last year’s “In My Feelings” I think. Sure, songs like “Money In the Grave” have done fine, and his “Care Package” bullshit is at the top of the album charts despite it just being a bunch of old songs re-released, but Drake hasn’t really come close to a number 1 track in a while and I think it’s because he’s lost a bit of his creativity.
When he dropped “One Dance” it was such a new sound for him, when he dropped “God’s Plan” it had a crazy beat and a new flow for Drake, even songs like “In My Feelings” being the first to utilize the now-popular City Girls. These were all “risks” in his music that paid off immensely and he was rewarded for it. I’m not saying Drake’s going away any time soon, but I think if he wants to stay at the top for the next few years with newcomers like Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish making waves, he’s gonna have to step out of his comfort zone.
Taylor Swift Drops Lover Title Track, Is This Album Gonna Be Good???
I got chills the first time I listened to this. Ever since Taylor started to dip her toes into the sell-out puddle with Red I’d been asking for the old Taylor back. The Taylor that 6th grade me would listen to on my iPod Nano just to admire her gorgeous blonde curls on her album cover. I wanted the nostalgic, romantic, small-town Taylor that I fell in love with originally. So when “We Are Never Getting Back Together” came out, I started to think she was talking about me and her old sound. I lied in the twin bed I still sleep in to this day and prayed to the Lord above, begging him,
Father forgive me for my sins, I know I don’t deserve this, and I know your will is what is best for humanity and everything happens for a divine reason, but please, if destiny may allow it, let us get a lil tiny baby sliver of that old Taylor back. Just a morsel. I don’t need a whole album just a couple of songs to make me forget about how she literally made a song this year with the line “Hey Kids! Spelling is fun!”. Please.
and the man upstairs delivered with this track. Wow. Just a classic romantic ballad that let us know Taylor still has the ability to write a song with some emotion. We got a little taste of her lyricism with “Archer” and I was so excited to see it, but not hopeful there would be much more. Then this GEM comes out and now it has me literally excited for the new album.
EXCITED. FOR A TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM. I haven’t really enjoyed new T-Swift in like 5 years so this is crazy to me, especially after piles of garbage like “Me!” and “You Need To Calm Down” were the singles, I woulda cackled in your face if you told me I’d be excited for this album back in April. Will it crush the little hope I have left when the full project comes out this Friday? Maybe. But I certainly hope not because I really liked this newest single and, with it being the title track, I’d hope the album would build upon a lot of the same sound and themes.
What’s Up With All These Wicked Long Albums?
If you liked Young Thug’s album you’re probably also going to check out the new Quality Control album Control the Streets 2.
But if you’re going to check out the album, make sure you have AN HOUR AND FORTY FIVE MINUTES PUT ASIDE. This project is 36 songs long and no joke takes almost 2 hours to get through. This came out the same week as Young Thug’s 19 song album. Wanna guess how many units Young Thug’s album moved in the first week? Maybe high tens of thousands? Or a little over 100k? Nope.
HDD projects that the album will pull in 125,000-150,000 equivalent album units with 4 to 7 thousand of those units coming from actual sales. via Complex
125K to maybe 150K??? What??? That’s insane. What’s also insane is that it’s 4-7 thousand actual units. Meaning only about 5% of total sales came from actual album purchases. So where’s it coming from? Streams. I’m going to listen to any new album that drops that has hype at least once all the way through. So when Young Thug makes his album 7 songs longer than a normal album, he’s getting 7 extra streams from me and a ton of other people. So when Quality Control drops a 36 song project, anyone who likes the Migos will listen to all 36 at least once. That’s going to count for like 3 album units.
We saw this happen last year in the most obvious of ways with Drake’s 24 song long Scorpion. It’s a new Drake album, everyone’s listening at least once all the way through, maybe twice, which resulted in him breaking the first-day streaming record with almost 90 million streams.
Chance the rapper followed this trend with The Big Day being wicked long too. I trust Chance is a good dude, but I will say somewhere in the back of his mind he’s thinking “Im gonna get paid for people listening to these absolutely trash skits multiple times”. All I’m saying is, we’re going to see wayyyyyy longer albums being a trend because of the way streaming units are counted for.
Vince Staples’ New TV Show Looks Promising
I’m not the biggest Vince Staples guy, mostly because I haven’t dived too deep into his discography, but I definitely like him as a dude. It looks like he’s got a new show on Vice that I’d assume is scripted? And it looks pretty funny. He’s got great comedic timing, the way the show is shot looks cool from this short trailer, and it seems like it’s going to be something different for Vice who usually focuses on documentary-style shows about how marijuana farmers in Guatemala are stimulating the eastern-asian economy somehow. So yeah, this looks cool.
Mike Posner Walk Across America Update: He Is Recovering Nicely From His Near-Fatal Snake Bite. Yes, You Read That Correctly.
This is just gonna have to be a weekly segment at this point this story just keeps taking wild turns. Mike Posner’s walk across America hit a hiatus when he got bit by a snake and almost had to get his leg amputated. He went to the hospital and documented the whole thing. He’s now out and he’s still tapped as all hell. He’s gotta be taking some pain killers if he’s having those kind of acid-brained thoughts about how he’s getting too much sympathy after literally getting snacked on by a python. But it seems to be working for him, because he took some big steps the other day and is about to continue on his journey.
This man is so oddly inspirational. He’s a must follow on Instagram. He’s making something that sounds as dumb as walking across America seem like an inspirational Oscar-winning movie plot. I’m sure I’ll have much more updates on his walk to come in future posts.
Songs Made For Movie Soundtracks Just Hit Different
Anybody else live at their parents’ home but their whole family doesn’t actually live at the house so you basically live the life of a divorced 45 year-old man and you get very sad and lonely because all you do is work, eat frozen pizza, and watch TV? No? Ha ha me neither I was just JK-ing guys…
But hypothetically if that WAS my situation, I would want to distract myself from my crippling depression-induced loneliness by watching as many movies as humanly possible. And hypothetically I would’ve watched the film from renowned New Zealand director Taiki Waititi Hunt for The Wilderpeople.
This movie is absolutely delightful. The scenery of New Zealand is on full display and it’s gorgeous. The main characters have unreal chemistry and share hilarious dialogue, and the heart and friendship that weaves it’s way through the story is so sweet. On top of that, the soundtrack is dope. This song in particular grabbed me.
It fits the tone of the movie so perfectly. It’s simple, kind of goofy, light-hearted, and sweet. I obviously added to my library, and then wondered about this week’s…
Question of the Week: What’s The Best Song from a Movie Soundtrack?
This could be a song from a musical movie, for example “Let It Go” from Frozen, but it could also be a song that was made to accompany a movie, like “Accidentally in Love” from the Shrek 2. And honestly, I’d accept songs that weren’t made for a movie specifically, but just make you think of a movie it was in, like “Hooked On a Feeling” from Guardians of the Galaxy.
There you have it folks, let me know on Twitter, Instagram, send me a video of yourself saying what song you think is the best from a movie soundtrack and burn it over a DVD of Shrek 2 and mail it to my house to watch, etc.
AlSO, genuinely, if you’ve made it this far and actually read the whole post, please like the tweet or comment on the Instagram, or text me, or tell your friend about it, or whatever. I enjoy doing these a lot and it’s sort of one of the few hobbies/creative outlets I have so knowing people enjoy reading it really makes all the difference. Alright, thanks fam.
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