Welcome to the Future
Future dyed his hair blond, like, full-on blond, have you seen the photos?
In the year of our lord 2019 and after dropping an album which we’ll get to, the foremost ATL trap star went ahead and did the thing. There can be some grander meaning behind dying your hair if you’re so inclined to look at the hair in a certain light, something about how you’re trying out something new and that you next they’ll see you bring the Ferrari out the garage to celebrate this new beginning — but sometimes there’s nothing else to it: bleached hair is just bleached hair.
And sometimes you dye your hair blond because you dropped a stunning new album, Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD, and what’s become apparent simply can’t be denied anymore.
The rollout to the aforementioned album should have made that clear already, somewhere between the release of Future’s documentary (exclusive to Apple Music, much to my chagrin) and the rapper’s performance on Ellen DeGeneres’s show, or even his crowning achievement of winning a Grammy for singing “La di da di da, slob on me knob.”
It’s Future’s turn now.
The WIZRD is Future’s seventh studio album and marks the end of a historic run, the best one we’ve seen in a decade since Lil Wayne’s peak over the late aughts, a run that started way back in 2014 with the release of the mixtape Monster, an ode to hedonism and incessant pleasure and which would have been a magnum opus for anyone but Fewtch!, as the man followed it up with classic after classic. Since, he’s managed no less than six (!!!) different №1 albums, allowing him to pass none other than Elton John.
It wasn’t always this way. As Rico Wade’s cousin, Future got his start as a distant and bit member of Atlanta’s Dungeon Family, then known only as Meathead. (Seriously!) He’ll say, as he raps it on the album’s Rocket Ship, that he’s “been popping since [his] demo (bitch!)” but the man born Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn entered our collective consciousness only once he started dating pop star Ciara.
Then came the breakup, and things never were the same.
Viewed in this light, The WIZRD is the latest offering from the prolific rapper during his legendary run. After the breakup and starting with Monster, Future leaned in heavily and gave in to his darkest urges, becoming an actual monster in the minds of plenty by comparison to the universally beloved Ciara went down. (Not to mention that the rapper had cheated his way out of things, let’s be real here.) He was persona non grata and leaned into it, tenfold. For the most part, that’s the well he’s been going to for the past four+ years, the petty jealousy and gratuitous shots thrown at enemies and rivals, real or imagined.
Future’s post-Monster run has been a deeply dark and depressing one, though still inspiring (shouts to Andre Three Stacks!). The rapper’s universe is one where there are no rules except peak pleasure and immediate gratification, one that is rife with legions of fallen hearts and where always there are more lean, Xanax and drugs to do. Future’s music is trap’s confessional, where the man is both the one confessing his sins as well as the dear father absolving him of them.
Albums like DS2 and mixtapes like 56 Nights or Purple Reign have found their way to rap fans’ hearts of this decade as prime examples of the humanity of trap music. The bass was and is booming, and the drums are heavy af, but plenty of albums have that. What Future brought to the heart is a deep humanity and personality that came from his wounded ego and bruised soul, one that misses his homies and isn’t afraid to tell you every 58 of the different ways he does — but don’t you dare cross him. They’ll say he doesn’t rap about anything, but what’s more universal and human than running away from your inner demons and taking X number of drugs just to forget that you’re lonely and hate yourself?
The latest single from The WIZRD is album opener Never Stop, and for the most part that’s what Future has done. This is his seventh official album, but that tally is a bit misleading. To the seven albums, you must add four different collaboration albums, one soundtrack album (for the Superfly remake) as well as a whopping sixteen mixtapes. Gone are the days where mixtapes were just a flex zone where rappers would take other people’s songs and make them their own. Today in 2019, a mixtape is as much an artistic statement as any “proper” LP, which means that all told, this new album is Future’s 28th career project, and 13th since he started his legendary run in October 2014.
Never stop indeed.
This song also serves as a good rebuke to those who complain that Future ain’t a quote-unquote real rapper and that he doesn’t really rhyme as well as others. Because after a short intro, Future goes in and never lets up, the chorus master never needing one to convey all the heartaches and headaches that come with fortune, how “you’ll get rich and have problems that you never thought” and that gracing the pages of Forbes — like he has, as the 10th rapper with the highest earnings of 2017 — will affect his relationships. These aren’t exactly every day struggles, but strip away the Forbes reference, and coming from a troubadour like Future, these are hitting us straight in the feels. And we’re sorry but “you can tell I’ve been broke when you look into my eyes” might as well be framed in the Louvre.
Krazy But True is another highlight from the album. As is rather plain for, frankly, anyone with functioning ears, here Fewtch! explains how large a shadow he casts over the current generation of rappers — to the point where, he says in the above interview with The Fader, that he’s compelled not to be forthright and admit he’s stopped using lean. “I’m god to you n*****, I worked too hard just to spoil you n*****. You need to pay me my respects, your socks, rings, and your lean. The way you drop your mixtapes, your ad-libs and everything,” he raps on the track. “Damn, that’s crazy, but it’s true.” He spends the better part of a song discussing one thing, then dismissing it off-hand with the comment that it’s crazy but true. (Really, how Lil’ Wayne never made such a song in his prime is beyond us.)
Future, once it’s all over, will live on in history as one of the top 15 or so greatest rappers, an emblem for an entire generation of rappers, guys like Young Thug, Lil Baby, Juice WRLD, Gunna, and entirely too many others to count, as the foremost bluesman who always croons his heart out in a world full of them.
Add it all up and The WIZRD is an amalgam of all sounds from his post-Monster run, what with the hedonistic incessant pleasure fuelled by the non-stop drug use of DS2, the booming baselines and virtuosic piano of the godfather Zaytoven on Beastmode 1 and 2, as well as the very specific and unique r ’n b that’s become his trademark with his HNDRXX album, and which Drake could never, neeeeeeever, replicate. It’s the kind you hear again on the album’s Promise U That, which walks the line between cocky and petty and crosses it twice over. “Came in a car, you gon’ leave in a jet, I can promise you that,” he sangs through Autotune. “Came by myself, I’ma leave with your friends, I can promise you that.”
Remember, folks. He’s only this petty to spare us having to be ourselves; Future is both the anti-hero we need and the one we deserve, the asshole with the (at times) toxic masculinity who somehow created your four favourite breakup songs and eight different anthems.
The WIZRD is a Future album through and through with airy beats and thumping drums. But it’s its own sound, one that’s deeply wintery: you’re deep in the thick of a snowstorm, and you’re fucking fed up with the snow just like he is cause it’s cold af. As such, this new album feels not so much like an ending, but rather like the beginning of something new. He’s introduced this new Wizard character, for one thing, one we had only ever heard of in passing in interviews, like this one with MTV News, but never in songs only now for him to occupy the full stage at once.
It’s still the same old Future, only with a tiny difference.
Kinda like dyed hair, you know?
