Denzel Curry Bridges Hip-Hop’s Generation Gap With TA13OO

Eight Years in the Game and I Never Rode a Wave

Denzel Curry-TA13OO (Loma Vista)

As hip-hop overtook rock music as America’s most popular genre, it hit a midlife crisis. The rise of SoundCloud hip-hop and a new generation of very young popular artists was the result, leading to a generation gap that made it clear that a lot of older fans thought it was a false rebellion, rather than the genre’s equivalent of punk’s brush-clearing. Suddenly, a genre that had always seemed forward-thinking, at least musically, made many people realize what middle age means and sent them seeking refuge in listening to old Nas and Mobb Deep albums. If hip-hop is more defined by its emphasis on lyrics than any other pop genre, that’s swiftly changing. Even the best “mumble rappers,” such as Playboi Carti, don’t seem to care what they’re saying and are more interested with using their voice as a rhythm device; the highest points of Carti’s DIE LIT come close to an updated version of scat singing. The lyrics of Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Lif3” offer a few bars of chilling commentary on the desire to numb oneself with Xanax, rapped with such a mush-mouthed delivery that I had to look up the words to realize that he’s saying “Xanny, help the pain, yeah/Please, Xanny, make it go away/I’m committed, not addicted, but it keep control of me.”

But even teenage hip-hop fans seem to feel that something has gone wrong after the swift rises and tragic deaths of Lil Peep and XXXTentacion. I’ve seen YouTube comments in the run-up to the release of Denzel Curry’s TA13OO claiming the album will save hip-hop. That’s ludicrous hype, but songs like “Clout Cobain,” “Mad I Got It” and, especially, “Percs” come across like John Lydon or Joe Strummer in 1981 scolding the Oi! musicians who were influenced by NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS and the first Clash album. This is really difficult: Public Enemy alienated much of their audience by devoting their 1994 album MUSE SICK-N-HOUR MESS-AGE to attacking gangsta rap and drug use, even pot smoking. On KOD, J. Cole tried something similar earlier this year, although he gets his best results when speaking from the perspective of the stoned and exploring their flaws in first person (as on the title track or his feature on Jay Rock’s “OSOM”).

At the ripe old age of 23, Curry comes across as an elder statesman who’s dismayed the SoundCloud scene he inspired. (XXXTentacion was once his roommate.) When he shouts about his disdain for drugs and facial tattoos on “Percs,” the song never feels like a self-righteous lecture because it still sounds like badass boasting: beginning with a circus organ melody, it quickly settles into the “hardcore punk meets hardcore hip-hop” zone Curry has perfected on his 13 EP and IMPERIAL album. (He also credits dancehall reggae as an influence on his sole hit single, “Ultimate.”) It also helps that it’s coming from a rapper who released an EP called PLANET SHROOMS just a few years ago. Curry probably could’ve pleased his cult audience with an entire album where he yells over distorted and over-modulated synthesizers. But TA13OO shows a conceptual ambition and range that’s rare for a relatively mainstream rapper his age, even if it doesn’t quite pull it off. The album is divided into three parts, going from “light” to “grey” to “dark.”

The video for “Clout Cobain” is a spiritual descendant of Spike Lee’s BAMBOOZLED in its view of African-American pain getting sold in a distorted form as entertainment. (Also, think of “This Is America” and its dancers blocking our view of people throwing themselves out the window and the horseman of the apocalypse.) Curry plays a depressed clown performing for teens with facial tattoos who get handed Xanax bars and cups of lean by an older man like Catholic sacraments. The ringmaster lifts cash from his pockets while he raps. I wonder whether Curry is speaking from the perspective of a rapper who is more popular than himself in this song, like Lil Pump or 6ix9ine. The lyrics’ references to suicide, the video’s depiction of hard drug use and the general glum air sum up the past year in mainstream hip-hop. Without giving away the video’s ending, things seem to have gone better for Curry in real life than his character.

With “Clout Cobain,” TA13OO achieves everything it sets out for, and it steps out from Curry’s loud, hard and fast comfort zone into a sort of Goth hip-hop based on woozy synthesizers. “Mad I Got It” contrasts himself with the rappers he’s competing with. His big protest song, “Sirens,” is less accomplished. It’s not totally surprising but still disappointing that the album succumbs to casual sexism and homophobia: why compare the state of the U.S.A. to a “good girl gone bad girl who went gay ’cause of date rape?” Curry doesn’t seem to understand the nature of sexual orientation, nor does that line even make sense. Like a lot of songs that try to sum up everything that sucks about American life in four minutes, it gets off potshots that sound cool while it’s playing but don’t have much staying power. Guest JID outshines Curry here, and there’s a weirdly comforting tone to the chorus from singer Billie Elish (who also co-produced it): as the rappers tell us how America is falling to pieces, she offers a welcome bit of warmth telling them (and us) to stand our ground.

On the 13 EP’s “Bloodshed,” Curry accurately said “I get ignorant with intelligence.” The over-the-top violent lyrics of “Vengeance” and “Black Metal Terrorist” are explicitly credited to his alter ego Zeltron. The album’s first single, “Sumo,” makes a lot of noise but doesn’t leave much of an impression. But TA13OO starts off with its title track, a compassionate song about his relationship with a woman who was molested as a young girl featuring a sung chorus by Curry. But while this is his idea of “light” material, it addresses the long-term consequences of abuse realistically, while the “dark” third of the album comes across cartoonish and tries very hard to be edgy, although the final song, “Switch It Up” returns to some sense of his own personality.

Curry has found an unlikely middle ground between the political provocation of JPEGMAFIA (who gets a feature here) or the noise rap scene popularized by Death Grips and the shouted boasts about sex and violence from 6ix9ine. But that common area might be a shared machismo, even with leftist politics. It’s more remarkable that TA13OO steps beyond that to cover a greater musical and emotional range. “Black Balloons” picks up the story of his relationship with the abused woman from “Taboo,” with an upbeat melody and production and feature from Goldlink. Beyond “Clout Cobain,” it’s the album’s best shot at a hit single.

Curry isn’t saving hip-hop, and TA13OO isn’t a masterpiece. But it’s the best major label hip-hop album I’ve heard in 2018 after Pusha T’s DAYTONA and the BLACK PANTHER soundtrack, and it has enough merit that its flaws are worth taking seriously rather than just dismissing. It proves there’s more to him than an anger machine, and the response to the “Clout Cobain” video on YouTube suggests it’s worked as an intervention to some extent. (As of August 5th, when I posted this, it’s too early to see how high the album will chart on Billboard magazine’s top 200, but that video has almost 14 million YouTube views.) It would be bitterly ironic if “Clout Cobain” was a path to the stardom it critiques. Older hip-hop fans tend to overrate rappers like Joyner Lucas and Logic because they’re trying to make mainstream hip-hop with intelligent and positive lyrics even though their music falls well short of its intentions. Curry acknowledges and expresses both his id and conscience on TA13OO. This is the rare contemporary hardcore hip-hop album from a rapper who sounds like a three-dimensional person. And it suggests a path beyond the dual pitfalls of the stupidity of “Gucci Gang” and “Gummo” (which “Vengeance” quotes) and expecting the best current hip-hop to sound like READY TO DIE and ONLY BUILT 4 CUBAN LINX.

Addendum: if you want to see a hilarious misreading of the “Clout Cobain” video by a right-wing Christian woman so caught in her bubble of conspiracy theories about Satan, the Illuminati and Freemasons that she can’t tell that it’s doing the exact opposite of glamorizing drug abuse and suicide, check here. This shit is completely out of control on YouTube.