Fetty Wap is the Future and Future is the Past
15 minutes in hip-hop doesn’t last long, ask T-Pain
Public Enemy’s Media Assassin Harry Allen opened The Roots’ 1999 LP, Things Fall Apart stating “Inevitably, hip-hop records are treated as though they are disposable. They are not maximized as product, not to mention as art.” It was never made clear if he was talking about by the record labels or by the fans or by both.
For the most part, that statement still rings true, especially when you step back and look at both the release strategy and the title of Future and Drake’s new collaborative album, What a Time to Be Alive. Off the bat, it’s telling you that this is a very in-the-moment record. It didn’t exist yesterday — as it was a surprise release that we had little or no real knowledge of —and it very likely won’t exist tomorrow either, as people will have moved on.
If you look back at the career trajectory of an artist like T-Pain, you can see a time period in which he was being regularly employed by the biggest pop stars and rappers, lending his sing-songy hooks to turn their songs into massive hits. Kanye West’s “Good Life,” will forever erupt dancefloors when ‘Ye’s muted “Like we always do at this time!” opening line drops in, followed by Pain’s trademark, electronically-assisted crooning. Shit, T-Pain even opened the NFL season this year, performing the overplayed “All We Do is Win” to introduce the New England Patriots.
But just under a decade later, you’d be hard pressed to find a hip-hop fan today that really rides for T-Pain — one that doesn’t play for the Patriots, that is, — despite his many platinum songs. In fact, a lot fans will deny ever really liking his music in the first place. His solo hits, songs like “I’m Sprung,” “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)” or “Can’t Believe It” haven’t particularly aged well and weren’t all that great to begin with. Or who can forget “Bartender” with Akon, which represented a moment in time when we reached Peak Autotune?
The sharp decline of T-Pain’s popularity coincides with the release of Jay Z’s “(D.O.A.) Death of Autotune” song released in June 2009, which blasted Pain’s signature style and all of the artists that helped run the autotune trend in the ground. Despite Lil’ Wayne sticking up for Pain, (“Stop it, stop it. No, there’s no such thing as ‘Death of Autotune’. T-Pain is my dude,” he told Tim Westwood), the end was nigh. By September 2009, Lil’ Wayne had found a new artist to turn his skeletal raps into fully realized songs, stating on “Money to Blow,” “And we gon’ be alright if we put Drake on every hook.” It wasn’t long before T-Pain was more or less out of a job, resorting to parodying himself with The Lonely Island (“I’m on a Boat”) and Taylor Swift (“Thug Story”), and then basically never having another hit ever again.
Where T-Pain over-exposed himself with silliness, Drake fleshed himself out by revealing a surprising amount of depth on his solo projects. Despite Wayne’s sound strategy to have “Drake on every hook,” Drizzy eventually instead opted to save his vocals for his own tracks, rather than selling them to the highest bidder. This is probably part of the reason that Drake is the biggest rapper in the world right now and just maybe why Ca$h Money Records is in the state that it’s in.
But someone needed to sing those hooks, once hip-hop had left T-Pain behind and Drake eased back. Enter Future, who more or less adopted the same strategy as Pain, propelling songs like Ace Hood’s “Bugatti” and YC’s “Racks” into club bangers with similar, saccharine-dipped, autotuned hooks. He also carved out his own hits with songs like “Tony Montana,” “Turn on the Lights,” “Move That Dope,” and the ultimate guilty pleasure “Same Damn Time.”
But despite Future’s current, rampant popularity, his music lacks depth, which is not coincidentally part of the reason that it — like T-Pain’s music — is treated as disposable. We’ll enjoy his hits drunk, throwing elbows up at 1AM in the club, but years from now we’ll probably be ashamed for having done so. It’s likely to be looked at like 80s hair-metal bands are today; something that might have been great at the time, but we want nothing to do with now.
Drake’s decision to do an album with Future was a smart business move, because it keeps him in the “now” conversation and allows him to toe the line between the deep cuts of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and the cough-syrup, club anthems found on the new record. Produced almost entirely by Metro Boomin’, Future steers this ship, with Drake adapting to his style. Songs like “Big Rings” and “Plastic Bag” find Drake trying to do repetitive, Future-esque hooks, while songs like “Diamonds Dancing” are made for a cross-section of both artists’ target audience: strippers. This is the pinnacle of living in the moment. YOLO, etc.
But it’s telling when the most popular song on the album, “30 for 30 Freestyle” doesn’t have a catchy/redundant hook or even an appearance from Future. It’s one of the only tracks not produced by Metro Boomin’, with Drake’s in-house producer Noah “40” Shebib at the helm. In an experiment done by Rukkus.com, the site mined Twitter for what was the most popular song on What a Time to Be Alive. “Our methodology was fairly simple, we searched ‘_____ best song’ with the title of every track being inserted in the beginning, individually, and then totaled up the tweets since the album was first played at 6pm on Sunday,” writes Spencer Stein of the site. Drake’s deep thoughts solo cut won by a wide margin.
It should be noted that the individual track sales on iTunes mark “Jumpman,” “Diamonds Dancing,” “Big Rings” and “30 for 30 Freestyle” as the most popular tracks, in that order. Yet Future’s solo cut “Jersey” is the least popular of the set. Using both pieces of data, we can surmise that among people that bought the entire album, Drake’s solo cut was the most popular. Among people that purchase single tracks, the club anthem “Jumpman” was.
Where things get interesting is that just as Drake released If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and rained all over Kanye’s parade, it’s possible he and Future did the same to rookie Fetty Wap with the release of What a Time to Be Alive. The biggest crossover hip-hop songs of the summer were arguably Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” and “My Way,” the latter which Drake even remixed. Was it any coincidence that Drake dropped a surprise album five days before Fetty Wap’s hotly anticipated debut, in an attempt to steal his thunder?
And that theory comes into play largely because Fetty Wap has arguably stolen the spotlight from Future, and perhaps to some minor extent, Drake. Despite the fan support of Future’s DS2 album — released just two months ago — it paled in comparison to the endless spins that “Trap Queen” and “My Way” have been getting all year long. It’s pretty hard to get radio play on a song called “Fuck Up Some Commas.”
Fetty’s style is unsurprisingly similar to Future’s, in that he sings in autotune, letting the filter do most of the work for him. But unlike Future’s mumbly southern drawl, Fetty is *audibly* belting out his hooks and verses from his stomach, like the Whitney Houston of autotune. I can’t front, his self titled debut album has some incredibly catchy tracks. I mean, they all sound like “Trap Queen,” (See: “Trap Luv”) but they are catchy. But I also found myself laughing out loud at this record’s absurdity when his own crew tried to sound like him. “Does everyone in his crew rap like that,” I thought to myself while listening to “Jugg” with with an incredulous grin.
So to say in the headline “Fetty Wap is the Future and Future is the Past,” is really just being facetious. It is more a comment on how quickly we dump disposable hip-hop artists in favor of the next hot thing, which I can’t say I ever did to The Roots or Jay Z. It’s not to say that Fetty is a better autotune singer than Future, because… well, read that last statement again out loud and ask yourself how silly it sounds. Sure, Fetty Wap could very easily become the most in-demand hook singer in the game, somehow making us forget about Future, but that will inevitably happen to Fetty too. Unfortunately, when crossover hip-hop artists fall, they fall hard. Give our regards to Akon.
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