The Watch - Ep. 59: 'Mr. Robot,' Desiigner's New Single, and Lil Yachty Re-up

Episode Date: July 22, 2016

The Ringer's Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald discuss 'Mr. Robot' and TV's struggle to keep up with real-world issues. Then, Andy gives his glowing review of Desiigner's new single, “Timmy Turner” (2...2:00), and Lil Yachty's new record, 'Summer Songs 2.' Meanwhile, Chris celebrates Gucci Mane's return. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Before we get started, I just wanted to mention that the ringer, the best website, now has merch. Go to bitly.com slash ringer merch where you can find shirts and hoodies, and a portion of the proceeds from each purchase will benefit charity water, a nonprofit organization that provides clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Again, go to B-I-T-L-Y dot com slash ringer merch to cop the nicest fits. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk. Now.
Starting point is 00:00:31 Hello and welcome to The Watch Reha. My name is Chris Ryan and I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me on the other line, Eaton Adderall like Ticktacks. Goop home! It's Andy Greenwald! Woo! I almost got too excited.
Starting point is 00:00:45 I had to lower my mic levels. That was a good one. Little Andy. Yes. We'll boat. Chris, I'm so excited to talk to you today. We're fired up. We like things a lot, which always makes for a good podcast.
Starting point is 00:00:58 We disagree about it. something. It's 100 degrees in New York City right now. So I'm ready. We're almost up at triple digits in L.A., but it's a dry heat. Andy, goo-wop home, Gucci-Mane put out a record. You want to talk about this little Yachty thing, which I'm just, it's unsurprising that you adore it. I'm ready. I'm here for you. I'm your friend, and I just want to talk you through it. But first, we got to talk about Mr. Robot. I thought you wanted to talk about, I just saw Mike D. at Russ and daughters with his mom. Can I talk about that person? I saw your tweet, man. I saw you. I saw you.
Starting point is 00:01:30 see you recycling your content. I just wanted to talk about it with you for a minute. I felt like that was a very, like, weirdly intimate New York moment. It was very sweet. Yeah. So now you feel like you can leave. You feel like you're free. I'm trying to figure out what else I could do.
Starting point is 00:01:42 I did a Grub Street diet. I saw Mike D. and his mom at Russ and daughters. It's like, that's it. I honestly can't think anything else. Yeah. Richard Price is nodding sagely at your New York experience. Listen, I contain multitudes. Andy, so last night was episode technically.
Starting point is 00:02:00 episode two of Mr. Robot even though it is the two nets ago. That's right. It's Friday. And you know, it feels like it's episode three because that first episode was broken up into two long parts. Just to clarify, like that,
Starting point is 00:02:14 the first episode that aired last week with the intermission, oh, you know, maybe they are calling it three. I'm trying to figure out what they're calling. I think they're calling it three. I think you were right, Chris. I'm sorry. I told you they were calling it two. They're calling it three.
Starting point is 00:02:28 But the two, quote unquote, two episodes that were the premiere were written as one. It was just one long script, but then they decided that's... So when they said the season has 12 episodes instead of 10, that's because the premiere and the finale are extra long that they're calling two episodes each. Yeah, I mean, like the episode three or 2.5 or whatever you want to call it, that was actually...
Starting point is 00:02:46 It still came up as an hour 25 on my DVR. Yes. I mean, our man, Sam, he wrote some scripts, and he's in control of the ship this year, and they don't mind the extra content, you know? I mean... He goes to the cutting room floor, and then he puts... stuff back in the show. By the way, since I've been watching this season of Mr. Robot,
Starting point is 00:03:04 I got to say, suits looks lit this year. Am I wrong about that? Yeah, suits is good. It's peaks. It's really, it's a great time for suits. Suits looks like it turned into Oz. Like, I don't, my man is in prison. I literally don't know what the show is about. I just know that they've traded bespoke suits for prison jumpsuits. And I'm like, good use of the name. It's continued branding. I like early suits, actually. Um, Andy. I think that it's fair to say that there is been some rumbles out there that that Mr. Robot is is not coming out of the blocks as fast as people were maybe hoping. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:40 I think, first of all, I don't know if it's possible to name a second season to a fast and hot-burning show that didn't disappoint people in some way in the second season. Because somewhere Landry is very cross with you. You've just murdered a man in a garage. Exactly. But I mean that in terms of almost any series, like beloved dramas like Friday Night Lights, shows like the OC stumbled in their second season
Starting point is 00:04:06 before refining their footing. I mean, you don't, and honestly, it's not dissimilar to bands who have successful debuts with a second album. You know, you want to please the people who liked what you were doing before, but you also very much want to prove, sometimes in a almost like counterintuitive
Starting point is 00:04:25 or slate pitchy kind of way that you were capable of doing other things. big picture here I really think it's the smart move because the show needed to slow down and sink in it was very very fast burning and went through a lot of plot in season one also as much as we are still very much anchored
Starting point is 00:04:42 in Elliott's head we need the supporting cast to step up and be able to carry storylines on their own so that's really what a lot of this has been about but I very much see the opposite argument I had some issues with this episode myself but so where do you stand on those rumbles are you generating rumbles The, no, I'm not.
Starting point is 00:04:58 I'm just reading the tea leaves, man. That's what I do. And I love Twitter and I love reading people's reaction to television on it. And that's just what I'm seeing out there. Curtis, can you personally put on your, sorry to interrupt, but can you put on your, my favorite of your many, you have many alter egos. I think people only just begin to scratch the service of it. But you're Hollywood stockbroker where you're just like, you know, the ticker tapes coming out of the machine and you're seeing who's on who's going up, who's crashing. Like where?
Starting point is 00:05:25 Have I done that before? You did it once. Remember you told everyone to buy stock in a certain character actor. Go long. I'm still, I'm still, I'm protecting my position in Esmail. All of my, my early seed money is still there. You know, I'm not pulling out. So you're Christian Bail right now. You're air drumming still. You've got one eye and you're air drumming to this, well, well, this, well, this, well, these rumbles happen around. I'm Barry Pepper in 25th hour squeezing the stress ball. You can't, you can't shake me. The thing is that I felt like the second half of the Wednesday's episode started to come to life. So you got, I felt like the incremental steps that the Craig Robinson and maybe Gummer plot lines took towards the river were great. I love the Angela stuff where she is kind of going further and further down the rabbit hole and isn't sure where that leads is good. And I felt like the issue for me largely is that I am not.
Starting point is 00:06:26 not a huge fan of interior monologues, I think. Yeah, you may have found the wrong show. And that was largely what the first hour and a half of the show was. Yeah. I mean, I think that there were two like bravora sequences in the show. And there were a lot of great details in this episode, I mean. I think the F Society backstory and of the arcade and just the visuals of that were really striking and really cool.
Starting point is 00:06:53 I loved the last line. I liked, which. gummer is it is it is grace this is grace isn't it i'm pretty positive it's grace man i'll look it up you said mamey you said aunt mamey i said grace nah dog the tape doesn't lie you just you just swapped up your gummers that's sounds weird uh anyway it doesn't matter um i i really like i really like that my bad i just i loved actually the scenes with her talking to her her her her amazon alexa or whatever it's called i thought that that was very depressing and kind of cool. But the two sequences, the two things that were really, really working for me, I can't
Starting point is 00:07:32 believe I'm saying this. And I think this is the sort of thing that should make you feel good about holding your position in S-Mail Corp, which is the fact that the Angela scenes, the Portia Doubleday Michael Christopher scenes, were outstanding. And I look forward to them in every episode now. I think she has dialed into something with his character that is really unique and surprising and compelling. And he's just terrific. I mean, I think I said this before, but like he was this performance that he's giving on this show was the best thing on that AMC show Rubicon that should have been good and wasn't. Yeah. And he's basically doing that performance again on a better stage. That was terrific. I thought the Adderall sequence, especially when he was
Starting point is 00:08:08 ODing, was just incredible. I thought it was incredible filmmaking. And it's so the thing that it was full of the thing that I think the show doesn't get enough credit for, which is its sense of humor. The stairs lighting up like Hubert tiles, things glitching out. Yeah, it definitely, it had a, it had a a vibrancy that that even the first season didn't have. Yes. I think, so for as good as those things were, I think one of the tradeoffs, when you have someone,
Starting point is 00:08:37 you basically have anuteur for the whole season, the tradeoffs are one, he's absolutely making a, you know, a 12-hour movie. And so it is a very different show rhythmically and in terms of the pace of its storytelling. So it just, it doesn't feel as episodic or as punchy
Starting point is 00:08:55 as last year. It also means that the choices he's making are a thousand percent committed. And so all those theories that we touched on the other day, when we're, you know, the people thinking that he's in prison and Craig Robinson is the warden or all these things, I don't want any of that to be true because that doesn't interest me as much as anything else. But because this whole season is shot through Sam's point of view, and it's so committed to that, I feel like if he had had a different director come in for this episode and that director had the tone meeting and he told the director, it's going to look unreal, but by the way, this is all really happening. There may have been more of a tell.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like the guest director subconsciously would have given us a little bit of a helping hand. But Sam isn't doing that. And so we are basically lost in his point of view, which is fine and actually very similar to the show itself. But I very much hope that next week we get some traction that would push us back in the other direction that he is not in prison with Leon and that Craig Robinson really is just a guy who talks to his wife and goes to see suboptimal pickup basketball games because I want that to get moving. Right.
Starting point is 00:09:57 And it gets into a van on a hot day and isn't like turn on the air conditioner because his homie is smoking with the windows down. They filmed it in March. You know, I feel like that's a little bit of a... That's tricky. Just say it. I'm going to stick with for details. I liked the sort of three storylines of Grace Gummer, Craig Robinson, and Elliot, how they all were
Starting point is 00:10:20 basically very lonely people who were turning to a machine, even if in Elliott's case, it's a machine that's inside his head that he is nicknamed Mr. Robot or whatever. Grace Gummer going to the Amazon Alexa, Craig Robinson hooked up to this dialysis machine, our kind of loneliness being somewhat assuaged by the things that we can surround, the screens and the beeps and the boobs that we can surround ourselves with to make us feel like we're not quite alone. And I thought that the parallels between those three stories were actually, I was starting to feel like, you know, the theme so far of this early season seems to be that maybe Elliot
Starting point is 00:10:58 isn't that crazy. Right. When compared to other, when compared to everybody else, if you look at it in a different way, uh, some of the things that Elliot thinks and some of the things, the ways that Elliot is are not that insane. Also, this is one of the few episodes or one of the first episodes that really gave us an unadulterated look at what. other characters think of Elliot.
Starting point is 00:11:20 When Mowgli is talking about what he wants the arcade for, he's like, this guy is a genius. He's the smartest, you know, essentially saying he's the most charismatic hacker in the world. You know, they all have opinions of him that we hadn't really considered because throughout the bulk of their work together in the first season, we only saw Christian Slater interacting with them, you know, as the aggressor. But in fact, of course, they saw Elliot doing both sides of it. So that was kind of interesting. Right. I also want to say Rami was on one in this episode.
Starting point is 00:11:48 he was in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master in a small part I feel like he was definitely channeling Joaquin in the scene where he's just going from the window to the wall he was doing the Yingang twin scene in the master yeah when he was and I really his speech in the in the sort of support group is great that they've had a couple of you guys need to they've had a couple of Matrix speeches in the show
Starting point is 00:12:13 and this was by far the most unhinged convinced an idiosyncratic one. I agree. All of that being said, I could have done without him pawing through his own vomit to pick up pills to swallow them again. That's just me.
Starting point is 00:12:27 You know, maybe that's just me as a viewer saying that. Maybe other people were into that. See, to me, that's actually, that is the quintessential New York Day. Exactly. Well, that's what happens if you don't turn on the air conditioning
Starting point is 00:12:38 when it's that hot, unfortunately. You know, milk was a poor choice. Yeah, it's, I am, I mean, the argument I'm sort of making goes against a lot of what I think about TV. So I want to preface it by saying it,
Starting point is 00:12:55 but I do feel that we are not getting the same episodic show that we got last year. I think this is, these are essentially the thing that I often rail against, that seasons of a show are novels and the episodes are just chapters. You know what I mean?
Starting point is 00:13:08 But because of the nature of how they filmed this, which was, you know, they blocked shot it. So they did not shoot these scenes in any order. They shot them on location. So on any given day,
Starting point is 00:13:17 if they were at the, basketball court, they could have been shooting scenes from episodes 1, 2, 6, and 9 or whatever. Right. And the fact that Sam is conducting the whole thing like an orchestra, it does feel different. So for as much as I want to say that this was not one of my favorite episodes, it contained some of my favorite things. But, you know, it's a different momentum is the other thing. The thing about the first season, and I think one of the reasons people really, really liked
Starting point is 00:13:43 it at the beginning and then loved it at the end was because the show made a promise and delivered on the promise. The show said, we are going to do this hack in episode one, and they did the damn hack in episode 10. That gives a structure to a season that a lot of shows don't. And this season, we don't know what they're doing. And that makes us, like, we're in the backseat of a car, and it feels like it's a long drive because no one's told us where we're going. And I watched this, actually, I think that there's a, this show is coming out into a slightly different world, too. I watched this episode last night. Like, I started it after the Trump speech. So there's a degree in which some of the things that it was playing
Starting point is 00:14:17 around with last year don't seem so crazy this year. And also, I think that the show, because the first two episodes or the first three episodes, however you want to say it, are inside, so largely set inside of Elliott's head that some of the things that we probably want, which is a little bit of more clarity on, okay, so there's no more personal debt, what happened to the treasury, what happened to the president? Like, we're getting signals about those things, but we don't have like a real lay of the land moment. Nobody has sat down and said like ever since that night, here's everything that's going on.
Starting point is 00:14:52 That's a good point. And I wonder if a lot of the appeal of the first season came from that the friction between implausibility and whoa, that chill of fear that maybe it's more plausible than we realize. And I think you're making a good point that it is emerging into a different landscape where I pre, and I think it's poised to succeed in the landscape because of that sense of humor and absurdity
Starting point is 00:15:15 that I mentioned earlier, you know, the fact that Jack Liu was on the show, I mean, actor playing Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Liu is on the show with, literally with egg on his face. The fact that Philip Price keeps talking about the semi-fredo, you know, the sort of grand theatricality of these villains and the sense of glee they're having. I mean, to watch it, and I also was a night behind because I was flying back from LA, so I watched it last night, too, just like you did, after a nominating speech that, you know, Paul Verhoven on the set of Starship Troopers
Starting point is 00:15:44 would have been like, it's a little on the nose. To take it down a notch. So to go from that, you almost want to, I almost want robot to have pushed the gas even further. Right. And someone else, I don't know if you brought this up or there was a different conversation I was having, wondering if the show will somehow be lessened.
Starting point is 00:16:05 You know, I think this was our friend Sarah Lewitt who said this to me the other night, who is a super fan of the show. that I think she was wondering if it would lose some of its efficacy because the show is now stuck in 2015 because of its desire to be, you know, in its moment and allow time to pass at a normal rate. I think it's entirely possible. It's a, you know, it's a casualty. This often happens with movies I find, and I think it's been more and more pronounced recently where a film will come out. And I think we were actually talking about this a little bit.
Starting point is 00:16:38 I've seen this mentioned with Vice Principles a couple of times where it's like this is just a weird like it feels a little bit weird the dynamics of this show within a way that they might not have in 2010 necessarily just because not because those problems didn't exist in 2010 but I don't think that they were in the forefront of American imagination then and so it's a little bit I think I think Mr. Robot has the same issues where you almost wish they could be shooting and shooting these in a week and making them in the world that they're in rather than the more in March. I also do feel that the general vibe of the country right now in July, late July 2016, as opposed to even September 2015 is not fear that the structures we depend on are vulnerable
Starting point is 00:17:31 to attack from outside, but that they're incredibly vulnerable to. attack from within. Yeah. You know, the things we took for granted that F society gleefully tore down suddenly feel much more unstable without so much as a kernel panic or whatever being placed inside of them. So that's sort of a weird, it's a weird feeling. I mean, a couple people, I've spoken to a couple of people in different levels of engagement,
Starting point is 00:17:56 different levels of fandom of this show or of media in general in different age groups. And a bunch of them across those groups have said they struggled with the season premiere just because they were kind of in a funky headspace. Like they just kind of weren't ready to go on that trip, which is interesting and specific. And certainly not something you can plan for in the moment. So we'll keep our eye obviously on a robot and keep talking about it over the next couple of weeks. And we'll obviously probably be back on Monday to talk about night of. And maybe we'll do a preacher catch up.
Starting point is 00:18:27 Maybe we can do some further stranger things discussion. But right now let's take a quick break and come back. And we'll talk about some really incredible. rap music they got re-release this week. Hey guys, I just want to tell you a little bit about this new app texture that I've been checking out. Thanks to pizza, we are all binge eating. And thanks to Netflix, we're all binge watching. But now with texture, you can start binge reading. Trust me, this is going to be a thing. When it comes to magazines, you know what you like. And with texture, you can get all the magazines you want in one super convenient place. Texture is completely
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Starting point is 00:21:38 Download the Seek app and enter promo code watch today. Panda. Panda. Oh, we're past Panda, my friend. Way past Panda. A couple weeks ago, you had a, I don't know what you were doing, but we did the podcast. You called in for 15 minutes. And then I talked with Sean Fennstein and John Caramanica, a bunch about some of the rap, some rap that was out.
Starting point is 00:21:57 And we talked a lot about this designer X-El X-X-L magazine freestyle that had come out where it was this Timmy Turner freestyle where he just sort of, to paraphrase John, throat sang this incredible somber funereal, like him. And there had been in rumors and like he had been in the studio with Mike Dean and he was going to put it out as a song and that kind of got delayed and delayed. and then last night or two days ago, because I think it was yesterday, finally came out. And you have been texting me pretty much ever since then, being like rap music is awesome. So I want to give you the floor here to just play at the altar of Timmy Turner. Yeah, I want to say, I think this is one of those years suddenly
Starting point is 00:22:42 where rap music is so vibrant, so thrilling, so elastic, and so full of possibilities that it's just like it's a joy. It's just a joy to be getting hit with these different sounds and different ideas on a regular basis like this and we're going to talk about more things but specifically I think this designer song is the strangest most haunting most compelling song I've heard this year I have not listened to anything else today okay I listen to some Gucci just before recording but other than that I listen to I listen to Timmy Turner like 20 25 times today I don't know any of the words that he says in this song it to me sounds like the lost collaboration between
Starting point is 00:23:20 lead belly and grave diggers it's like it's like it's like the thing about Robert Johnson meeting the devil, but then the then recording with the devil. Like I play this to our old old friend Matt and he just basically asked me, he just wrote me a text back saying, was this in the Alan Lomax archives? It is such like a, the song comes from such an intense dark place and it's deeply melodic. And you mentioned Mike Dean, like the key change and the beat change at the end. But just that there's this amazing specificity to it. There's this mournful specificity to it. Maybe it's because rap songs generally don't just have people's
Starting point is 00:23:57 names as the title. And I assume he just picked the name because it sounded good in his weird style of rap singing. It's a Rugrats character, right? What's that? Isn't it? Tate? Tammy Turner. Isn't it a Rugrats character? Fairly odd parents. Right. That's really a thing? Nickelodeon show. Yeah. Wow. That I am older than
Starting point is 00:24:15 the sun. Like that is just bizarre to me. But fine, even better that I don't understand it. You know what I mean? There's something we were talking about the spectacle that was on TV last night, which shook me up, like it shook a lot of people up, I think. And this song made a lot of sense to my ears today. I just think it's astonishing. And it's even more astonishing because, you know, I think a lot of people know this,
Starting point is 00:24:37 but this kid designer is like a teenager who recorded Panda at home on his laptop, aping future, basically, talking about broads in Atlanta, having never been to Atlanta. I don't think he's even left the Tri-State. It's signed by Kanye. that song goes to number one. They released a mixtape a couple weeks ago called New English that is pretty terrible. But every time he's on something, and I mean on a song, not on drugs, although maybe he is, there's something interesting there.
Starting point is 00:25:05 Like on that posse cut champions, his ad libs are the most interesting thing about it. And I don't know, I don't know, it's amazing to watch. Did he stumble into something here? Or is he secretly some kind of savant genius? But this is my song in the year. The thing that John and me and Sean were trying to figure out. is basically like did did good music do this to him or did he do this to good music? Right.
Starting point is 00:25:27 And is he someone who is just benefiting from Kanye and pushes guidance? Or is he someone who was bringing something really fresh to that? I'm going to just throw the devil's advocate thing out that no beat sort of grind in really could have met my expectations for what Timmy Turner was going to sound like. So I enjoy the Mike Dean It's a good track But I feel like it's almost There's just too much music over designer
Starting point is 00:25:55 Like I would have loved it if it was just like a bass line Or just a beat or whatever But it's still a really good track That that being said Another person that is making you very excited And is making me very I'm fine with it I'm okay, I'm good
Starting point is 00:26:10 Is Loliati Who had Who was one of the first people We actually wrote about on the ringer This when we launched is Victor Luckerson wrote a great piece about a Yadi song called Running, right? That sampled a old Nintendo video game, like music clip and turned it into a track. And Victor's piece is all about nostalgia and the way we interface with our memories and with our childhoods.
Starting point is 00:26:38 But this, you know, since then, Yadi has kind of taken a little bit of a leap and he obviously got the Apple Music. anointment. And Zane Lowe has been tweeting about him for days now. And he just put out summer songs two the other day. And this dude is really all of a sudden, like, everywhere in our faces. I know that you just, you kind of happen upon his stuff and just are, you were really blown away.
Starting point is 00:27:03 Yeah. I mean, I, here's the secret. If the song is about summer or being a teen or teenagers, like 80% I'm going to love it. 80 like I just I like that kind of specificity in pop music I think the best pop music is very often about those intersection of those two subjects I still remember the day that um katie Perry's teenage dream leaked or debuted on the radio and I was nowhere near a computer and you like that came on the other day at like the place where we get lunch and I think like four of us were like damn this song is really good I was I was shopping with my wife and you called me and I this even if this isn't true I feel like you you Marvin buried me I feel like you held your phone up to some sort of speaker. Yeah. You got to remember that, when that song came out,
Starting point is 00:27:48 people were like, damn, Katie Perry solved the Rubik's Cube of pop music. Yes. That is essentially a perfect pop song, and it came out at the exact right time. And so to hear this record and have it just be so gloriously oddball and sweet,
Starting point is 00:28:04 and it culminates, I mean, until Timmy Turner, so basically yesterday I had one song of the year, and now I have a different one, so you could trust my judgment as you may. but there's a song on this mixtape called King of Teens, which I can't believe this is his thing, and at the same time, I can't believe no one else did this first.
Starting point is 00:28:23 You know, I did a, you know, when we talked about Blink 182 the other week, we talked a little bit about pop punk and emo and my chemical romance, another favorite of mine, old favorite of mine, you know, there was the tease that they were going to reform this week. They are not. They're just releasing a special edition of Black Parade 10th anniversary. And we are still going to pod the shit out of that, by the way.
Starting point is 00:28:42 But there's a song in there called Teenagers. This idea of a rapper being basically saying, I am the youth. I'm supported by the youth is kind of exhilarating and weirdly surprising that no one has, people don't really, haven't really done that. Like, Chief Keefe was a teenager, but he's basically a bigger nihilist than, well, I can't think of a famous nihilist. He'll have to help me. Donald Trump. Right, exactly. No, he's not, there's nothing similar between Keith and Trump.
Starting point is 00:29:10 No, Keith contributes to the world. But the song, because what's so crazy about this, he's a teenager, right, from Atlanta, Liliatty, which by the way, great name. And his nickname is Little Boat, which is even better. The music behind him is basically like Trop House or like Chill Wave. It's soft rock beats. And I find it so summary and exciting. And even though he says some pretty terrible things, there's a metaphor about plunger on the first track that it's a little disturbing. I've been listening to 21 Savage this week
Starting point is 00:29:45 so it sounds like Lil Yadi is basically like speaking in Pokemon there's nothing on there that that drop my attention the thing about Yadi that's interesting I was chatting a little bit about this with some of our co-workers is I remember I'm gonna do like an old man name drop right now but when I first moved to New York
Starting point is 00:30:04 one of the first pieces I did as like a music journalist was for Time Out magazine for Timeout New York and it was with James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy when DFA was just sort of popping off. And they were so adamant that the problem with American music was that unlike England, it had not had an MDMA revolution. And I really do think that Yadi and to some extent, Maconan, this is not like an original thought, but I just think you're starting to see more and more the long-term recreational use of Mali really affecting music. because this is not like the way that a lot of people conceive of
Starting point is 00:30:42 or maybe even prefer their rap music to sound. It isn't stark. It isn't cold. It isn't hard. And I, you know, like you and we grew up with like singing jaw rule and Ashanti songs in our 20s.
Starting point is 00:30:54 So it's not like we're completely unfamiliar with the idea of pop or sunshine being in our rap music. But it is interesting to listen to this like you're saying, the chill wave almost like soundscape style that he employs. is quite different than 21 Savage or even Gucci Main. I agree with you. I think the best kind of art in any medium is one that can allow the expression or celebration of all emotions.
Starting point is 00:31:22 And we've talked on this podcast before about for us with being music fans, like coming of age in the 90s, essentially, like finding like-minded people who would listen to pavement and Biggie was like a big struggle because it had to be one thing or the other all the time. and what in some ways I think the most important record of the year is is probably Chance's coloring book because his fluency and his facility with different styles, the fact that he can
Starting point is 00:31:49 sing with the children's choir on one track and then have Thug and Yadi on another track. And everyone seems okay with that and happy with it. And he's so nimble about jumping between the two styles suggests a more, I mean, it suggests a fuller range of expression possible in hip-hop because in the same way that, you know, you and I love vicious crime novels. We also like comedy. You know, we like a lot of things. I love comedy.
Starting point is 00:32:14 We love to laugh. But for as much as we love reading novels by James Crumley or whatever, we can't read a hundred of them in a row. Right. Well. Okay. He's only wrote eight before he passed away, so you're right. But I'm just saying like...
Starting point is 00:32:27 But you can just keep reading them. I do. I keep reading them over and over. I'm not doing a good job with analogies at this moment. I know what you mean. I know what you mean. But what I mean is, it's pretty exciting to me that there is
Starting point is 00:32:39 because there used to be this thing where like, you know, the only real rap was hardcore rap. But even the people making, like, think about, this brings us a little bit back to Gucci because Gucci is out of prison and made this record that has some terrific songs on it. And our friend John Caramanica did the first interview with him in the Times and it's a great profile.
Starting point is 00:33:01 And in it, he is like a man in full, right? He's like out of prison. he's sober now. He's eating kale. He's hanging out with Harmony Corrine, and he's recording with Young Thug, and he's doing sneaker commercials, and it is part of,
Starting point is 00:33:17 this art is part of his life, it's not the totality of it. And so the fact that there can be this Yadi record and 21 Savage, which I'm having trouble with, I'll be honest with you, but the fact that there can be this bright summary, youthful celebratory pop record,
Starting point is 00:33:31 and it is just a, you know, the barest genre, slide over from what Gucci's doing and there's this sense of collaboration and fun that so that all these tracks and the reason we want to talk about them together is because they're all sort of running into each other in my mind and on my Spotify playlist or whatever it's just it seems like a really vibrant moment in the best possible way yeah it's a cool moment and it's it's way too nice out for me to hate on yaddy so I'm really glad that he's out um maybe we'll talk a little bit more on monday about Gucci um but yeah um yadi and uh what what's your track what's your track on the Gucci record
Starting point is 00:34:04 On the Gucci record? Yeah. Guap home with Young Thug. With Thug, yeah, that's the best track. That's the best track. Although Kanye sounds really good on this record. He does. He does?
Starting point is 00:34:14 I mean, you know, I think if you were waiting at home for us to compliment Kanye in this conversation, you can drink now. All right. Andy, I will talk to you on Monday. Until then, thanks for listening. I hope you have a great weekend. Great job, Beretsky!

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