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.
Sex and the city with Cash Cobain and Chow Lee
Cash Cobain and Chow Lee treat all of New York like it’s an X-rated dating show—and they’re the only available bachelors. The obscenely horny tone of their 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy Deluxe mixtape is set in the opening verse. While a sliced and distorted sample of Afropop star Tems swirls in the background, Chow Lee starts to sing in a voice that’s light and sweet, with a hint of wistfulness: “All right, she tryna’ wait for me, bitch I’m a whole ass thot/She tryna’ lock me down, cuff me up, she a whole ass cop/She wanna hold my hand, hold my heart, bitch hold this cock.” That is not what he was supposed to say. He was supposed to say a variation of I miss you, or I want you, or I need you! But Cash Cobain and Chow Lee treat sex as if they might spontaneously combust without it.
Importantly, though, their music is different from the waves of “toxic” R&B popularized by Future and OVO lotharios like dvsn and PARTYNEXTDOOR. It’s a lot less serious and tormented than that. Cash Cobain and Chow Lee don’t feel bad. They’re not trying to change their ways. Instead, it’s closer in mood to the singer Brent Faiyaz’s life of partying, juggling women on the side, and then ditching them once he’s bored. There are no regrets to be found here.
But even compared to a writer like Faiyaz, Cash and Chow are slightly less chill. For one, they’re nastier. Sex isn’t ever vaguely alluded to—it’s always laid out in vivid detail. “Girl you look good, let me taste it/I’ll have you cumming and squirting and shaking,” Cash softly sings on “Vacant.” Also, they’re messier. On “Wavy Lady 2,” Cash sweet talks this girl he’s feeling by wailing about how he wants to give her a baby. (It’s fair to assume he took that pledge back the next morning.) And when they fall for someone, they get so turned-on that they might as well start barking like Will Smith in the Fresh Prince. “I wanna fight your father, nigga who her daddy?” is Chow’s reaction to spotting a fine-ass woman on “JHoliday2.”
The bed-hopping tales are made even more distinctive since they’re surrounded by uptempo beats instead of moody, washed-out ones. The mixtape’s production is a kinetic fusion of sample-drill and Jersey club, produced by Cash Cobain and a few outside contributors. Cash was raised in the Bronx but adopted by Queens, where his beats for local rappers Shawny Binladen, Big Yaya, and Flee were some of the earliest in NYC to reimagine popular songs of the past through the lens of drill.
These days, that sound has been run into the ground, but Cash and company still do it well because even though there are recognizable samples on 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy—“Hey There Delilah,” “I’m on One,” “Corazon Sin Cara”—the draw isn’t nostalgic but rather how its reinterpreted into something new. Not all the samples click: The Chris Brown “Like a Virgin Again” flip is too on-the-nose and the Fergie rework is played-out. Generally, though, it seems like Cash could cut up your cousin’s grainy-ass SoundCloud upload, garnish it with stuttering drums and bed squeaks, and turn it into gold.
What gives the mixtape another boost is that Cash and Chow’s sex and Henny-fueled voyage through the city feels rooted in everyday reality and not just the life of celebrity. Whether it’s Cash and the girl he’s with saying they hate each other (and still going home together), or the New York specificity of their stories, like when Chow brings a girl on a date to the Williamsburg fusion restaurant New Apolo with his only intention being to get her in his bed. Real-life mess is way more fun.
We need to talk about that absolutely wild Nardo Wick needle drop in Elvis
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is more than two-and-a-half hours of breakneck insanity—it gives off the same adrenaline rush as hitting three figures on the speedometer. I kind of loved it. As the movie slows down toward the end, Baz’s Elvis love turns into worship. Oh, if you were wondering why Elvis cheated on his wife (Baz glosses over the fact that he married her while she was a teenager), it was because he loved her too much. Oh, if you were wondering what reunited the nation after the assassinations of MLK and RFK in the late ’60s, it was some shitty Elvis “protest” song. Besides all that, the most batshit moment of the movie was the song that plays in the closing credits. Spoiler alert: The movie ends with Elvis’ death, and as the credits roll they go into his infamous 1969 hit “In the Ghetto,” an overblown ballad about the cycle of inner city poverty, but remixed by Jacksonville, Florida rapper Nardo Wick as “Product of the Ghetto.”
Yeah, the Elvis soundtrack is full of pop stars like Doja Cat and Kacey Musgraves. But the Nardo Wick of it all just makes no sense to me—especially seconds after Elvis’ death scene. He’s got some fine songs—the “Who Got Smoke” remix is undeniable—but I can’t think of a single reason why he was the choice for this remix, unless the executive producers have a soft spot for his so-bad-it’s-good XXL Freshman freestyle (“Don’t none of us got diarrhea, but my niggas always takin’ shit”).
Of course, “Product of the Ghetto” is awful, though I don’t blame Nardo Wick. The rap update of the track is just unnecessary, and no guitar loop or generic rap drums can change my mind. Nardo Wick gets off some autobiographical bars in his whispery delivery, but it would have been way cooler if he went full Will Smith in the Wild Wild West theme song and just recapped the plot instead. The song would’ve still stunk, but at least it would’ve given some reason for it to exist.
Kasher Quon: “New Wave”
The days of the dynamic duo of Kasher Quon and Teejayx6 are long gone, but Kasher is recapturing the magic on his own. In the past few weeks, the lights have started to flicker back on at the Detroit rapper’s once-prolific YouTube channel. “New Wave” is his latest single and, despite the title, not much has changed. Kasher’s delivery is still offbeat yet conversational, and full of frequent moments where he stumbles through a line, yells “fuck,” and then keeps going. If anything is different, it’s that there are no more tales of credit card fraud and VPN scams—he’s playing it straight, sticking to laughing at dudes wearing borrowed watches, and blowing cash on his girl’s braids and nights out at Benihana. That’s probably a good choice; there were only so many grandmothers to scam and department stores to fleece. He was always more than the gimmick, and now he’s proving that.
Su’Lan: “This n’ That”
The Oakland duo Su’Lan don’t seem to be very fond of anyone but each other. On “This n’ That,” Saunsu and Emahalani saunter over a breezy Bay Area groove while making sure that everyone knows they don’t give a shit about them. “Bitches want to be my friend, but here’s the plan/I’m only fuckin ’round with sis, so you tell you bitches we don’t fuck with you hoes,” Emahalani raps in the first verse. That point is made stronger later on, when Saunsu lays down even more disrespect: “Yo’ mama a hoe,” she raps in a near whisper. My advice to their targets is to not take it too personally, Su’Lan have this smoke for everyone.
Is Trina a pro wrestling manager now?!
Ot7Quanny: “Dame Lillard”
I should probably be tired of the vocal trick in every Ot7Quanny song where he puts his voice through a filter so it sounds like he’s rapping from the other side of a wall. But I’m not. It sounds incredibly sick. The Philly rapper is back at it on “Dame Lillard,” rapping over a beat with a nightmarish vocal sample that makes his punchlines feel momentous. “I grew up off Yo Gotti, Jeezy, bring the trap back,” he declares, laying out what his sound aspires to in one line. Then he follows that up with, “I’m in Memphis with some grizzlies tryna’ bring the smack back,” a style of simple but effective wordplay that is timeless in Philly. It doesn’t really matter if you’re in or out on the drowned-out vocals when the rapping is this good.
javi and SHONE: “*wanna_do?”
When javi raps “What that nigga wanna do?” over and over again on the hook of this song, it’s like they locked eyes with someone across the party and can’t decide whether to brush them off or bag them. Adopting the melodic but in-your-face flow that made the 2021 EP it’s i always miss you so fun, the rapper from the loosely defined corazonn collective seems to get a rush out of letting people know they can’t have them. “Bitch you not gettin’ a taste!” they rap over a bouncy Osyris Israel beat full of arcade game effects. SHONE’s verse is less ambiguous, delivered in a casual pace that makes every line sound like a mantra: “I got fine niggas, I’ma put them in a zoo!” Together, javi and SHONE are the flirtiest duo around.
