Lil Yachty – Teenage Emotions
Whether you think Lil Yachty is an idiot or a genius, you must admit he is interesting. Last year Yachty went viral claiming Notorious BIG is “overrated”, and has since been cited as dismissing other Hip Hop legends whilst praising the likes of Kanye West.
Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert and Rae Sremmurd are opposing traditional wordy, conscious rap, and replacing it with a simplistic trap version that has become the enemy of Hip Hop veterans.
Throughout ‘Teenage Emotions’ Yachty doesn’t show any interest in trying to be articulate. In ‘Peek A Boo’ he exclaims, “blow that dick like a cello”. Consciously mistaking a Cello (a stringed instrument) for a wind instrument. Yachty is uninterested in lyricism, musicianship and instrumentation.
Does this matter? In Popular music, we tend to seek out the boldest personalities, in Lil Yachty you find a very contradictory, weird character that seems to laugh in the face of Hip Hop and all the legacies that come along with it. This lack of care could be seen as reminiscent of the attitude of the early days of Punk and Rock through its destruction of traditionalism and simplistic degradation of the original form of Hip Hop.
The song ‘Priorities’ seems like a nod to ‘Tik Tok’ by Ke$ha, with the most memorable chorus on the album. “Fuck school and Fuck the rules, imma do whatever I want to, when I say so”. This sounds like the lyrics to a punk song, but instead of shouting, Yatchy raps them in a strangely relaxed way over the top of a beat that sounds like the backing music to a nursery rhyme.
‘Bring It Back’ sounds like its trying really hard to be an 80s pop song, but instead it sounds like a really weird attempted pop song with all mistakes left in it. It sounds especially bizarre with the vocals lifted up incredibly high in the mix making them sound separate from the rest of the track.
This album is interesting but there is a definite lack of cohesive flow between tracks. The album feels too inconsistent and long to properly express the ridiculous and nuanced character of Lil Yachty. This doesn’t detract from the songs however and there are some genuinely enjoyable parts of this album that make it too silly to not enjoy. !
5/10
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