Aje
All Madden
cool. props
steadyrighteous
Veteran
I fukk with Wiki and RATKING. Will check this out.
Wiki Goes from Young Rap Star to Grizzled Veteran
On a new album from the charismatic figurehead of the energetic trio Ratking, the mythology of youth collides with reality.
The rapper’s new album, “Oofie,” is a past-tense document of disillusionment.
In the summer of 2010, at a block party in downtown Manhattan, a sixteen-year-old named Patrick Morales did something that had become a habit for him: he charged his way to the front of the crowd and began to rap. Given his talent and charisma, the intrusion was welcome. In the audience was a Harlem producer named Eric Adiele, who later said that Morales struck him as “this kind of rapping . . . New York Bart Simpson.” At the party, once the background music stopped, Morales—who is half Puerto Rican and half Irish, and goes by Wiki—continued to rap. Adiele approached Wiki about collaborating. (“I make beats, you’re not corny,” Adiele, who goes by Sporting Life, told him.) Eventually, the pair, along with another rapper, named Hak (Hakeem Lewis), formed a group called Ratking.
Like most young artists full of intensity and ideas, the members of Ratking set out to do something novel—or, at least, to resist the temptations of nineties New York hip-hop. But they wound up honoring the city’s hip-hop heritage better than most. On Ratking’s début album, “So It Goes,” from 2014, the trio painted New York as a creative playground, rather than as a city that had all but closed its doors to young and financially disadvantaged artists. New York authenticity was treated as a birthright, not as an object of aspiration or nostalgia. Ratking avoided the narrative of a New York flattened by money and technology. “Think the city has let up? Get up, wake up / Open your eyes,” Wiki implored on a song called “Canal.” Inspired by the nineteen-seventies electronic-art-punk act Suicide and the raucous dynamism of the Wu-Tang Clan, Ratking made the kind of noisy and confident hip-hop that the Beastie Boys, Dipset, and the A$AP Mob had before it. But the music didn’t sound as if it had been directly copied from these groups; instead, Ratking had cut its own path through a similar array of New York-specific experiences and touchstones—turnstile-jumping, uptown house parties, noodle houses and bagel shops, punk and rap music, intergenerational fraternization at skate parks, malt liquor and weed. “This ain’t nineties revival / It’s earlier / It’s tribal revival,” Wiki rapped on “Protein,” a frantic, skittering track from “So It Goes.”
Ratking soon disbanded, but Wiki, the group’s magnetic figurehead, was primed for a solo career. On his full-length début, “No Mountains in Manhattan,” from 2017, he sounded like the protagonist of a Harmony Korine fever dream, a tiny, petulant charmer fast-talking his way through bodega lines and subway stations. In Wiki’s cartoon-strip rendering of Manhattan, he could win over beautiful girls despite his small stature and missing teeth, and he could make it onstage in the nick of time, no matter how much he’d drunk. The album’s production created a collage of satisfying textures—soul samples, deep bass, gritty lo-fi noise arrangements, and careful orchestral flourishes—for Wiki to play with. In Ratking’s early days, his rhetorical virtuosity and forceful delivery earned him comparisons to Eminem, but on “No Mountains” that dense, brute-force style gave way to more complex and supple verses. Verbal gymnastics came easy to him, and he knew it. “You was the worst rapper / I was the best rapper!” he shouted on a track called “Mayor,” gleefully stressing “You” and “I.”
“Mayor,” which sampled a soul song by the Arrows, was like a campaign anthem, positioning Wiki as a quasi-political leader in his own neighborhood. He wore a suit in the video, which featured him going around New York and meeting strangers. But his arrogance and self-mythologizing were substantiated by obvious lyrical talent. On the Web site Talkhouse, the New York rapper—and former member of Das Racist—Heems described “No Mountains” as “a love letter to New York I wish I could have written, but am happy someone else did.” Wiki found friends and admirers in high places: on “Made for This,” a song about being predestined for greatness, he went toe to toe with the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah. In a short time, he’d become peers with those who helped shape New York rap.
But the churn of the music business quickly turns young stars into grizzled veterans, and, in just a couple of years, Wiki has outgrown most of his boyish enthusiasm. His new album, “Oofie,” is a document of disillusionment—not with New York City but with the trials of young rap stardom. Whereas he used to rap mostly in the present tense, much of his new album switches to the past, offering a more rueful perspective on the hedonistic pursuits of his teen-age years and early twenties. (There is even a song called “Back Then.”) The mythology of his youth collides with reality on this album, which has a slower, more laborious energy to it; he laments his inadequate streaming numbers, drained bank account, and drug and alcohol abuse. The record begins with a murky beat and murmuring voices speculating about Wiki’s decline. “He’s lost it,” one mutters. “Every time I’ve seen him, he’s been drunk,” another says. “He’s a scumbag.” Raw talent is a thrilling gift, but in the absence of friendship, commercial success, or infrastructural support—before this record, Wiki parted ways with his label, XL Recordings—it can be a torturous companion.
Still, Wiki’s verbal skills are just as effective when refracted through bitterness and regret. “Oofie” takes all the vividness he once levelled at New York and channels it inward, offering a despondent portrait of self-loathing that doubles as a critique of the hype-hungry nature of contemporary rap fandom. Nostalgia for an earlier sound or a different New York was once the enemy, but now it has become a potent tool for Wiki, who describes the rowdiness of his school days with longing and lust. “Oofie” makes Wiki sound like a gentrifying city block newly overrun with chain restaurants and 7-Elevens—under siege but full of pride and history, nonetheless. “I played this game too long to move on,” he says on a song called “Pesto,” describing his rapping ability as “ten thou”—not as a boast but as a matter of fact.
Of all the distinct regional sounds and scenes made obsolete by the Internet, perhaps none have been recast quite as dramatically as New York hip-hop. The city’s rising stars now show little interest in the past. The calm pugnacity of Pop Smoke, a twenty-year-old breakout star and Brooklyn native, fits nicely into the city’s hip-hop lineage, but his sound is, quite literally, foreign—most of his grimy beats are made by 808Melo, a producer in London. 808Melo is a key figure in U.K. drill, a lively and controversial scene of young rappers who give voice to the crime and despair of places that are often overlooked in mainstream rap. U.K. -drill rappers, in turn, were inspired by the vibrant toughness of Chicago drill, which originated almost a decade ago. A crop of emergent New Yorkers—Sheff G and 22Gz among them—are legitimatizing U.K. drill in the U.S.
Other young New York rap stars, such as Lil Tjay and Smooky MarGielaa, are indistinguishable from the streams of melodic singer-rappers coming out of Atlanta, hip-hop’s commercial epicenter. Their New York-ness seems incidental to their success. Regional heritage and lived experience do not count for much in the economy of music fandom, which feeds simultaneously on novelty and conformity.
These trends are the source of a deep well of resentment for Wiki. “I’m an enigma they tryna get rid of / Thought I was a contender until they forget ya,” he raps on “Downfall.” But Wiki is a gifted storyteller above all, and, just as his earlier work was an imaginative exercise that turned New York into an urban Atlantis, “Oofie” is, at least in part, a dramatization. The album takes Wiki, the protagonist of his own adventure, to rock bottom, and then hedges with hints of future triumph. “Gotta be better, not bitter,” he raps. “I’ll be back in all of my splendor.” ♦
steadyrighteous
Veteran
Finally getting to this.
It's fukking fire.
It's fukking fire.
