Where Future sometimes makes his codeine habit seem analogous to less insidious, more abstract vices (and thereby makes the mechanics of his personal life more recognizable to a wider swath of listeners), Lucki’s rendering of addiction is lonely and unknowable. The album is a stark, heartbreaking exhibit of addiction to pills and lean - an addiction witnessed with great, detailed concern by Lucki’s own mother. With Freewave 3, his best record since Alternative Trap (2013 - three lifetimes ago), Lucki strikes on something very dissimilar but just as affecting. The Chicago rapper told the writer Alphonse Pierre, at considerable length, about how much Future’s music has meant to him, inspiring the way that the Atlantan uses his own struggles with substance abuse as fodder for music that makes the audience feel less like voyeurs and more like members of a community. But every once in a while you need to hear someone shout, “You start so much shit, you should carry a starter pistol,” very earnestly.Įarlier this month, Lucki sat for an interview with Pitchfork. None of which is to say he’s toned it down: three consecutive songs are called “3rd Eye,” “God MC,” and “University of the Streets.” (They come after “Numerical Slaughter,” a song that you can probably imagine before you hear it. What’s striking - at least it was striking to me, someone who hasn’t spent extended time with his work since Bush was in office - is to hear his version of the New York rap ideal stripped of the subtext of Papoose as a blue-chip prospect. His new record, Underrated, is comfort food of a certain kind. The thing is that Papoose was never as good as the internet pretended he was in ’06, but he was also never close to as bad as it pretended he was a decade later. By the end of the decade, he had become one himself - out of sight, out of mine, off of Jive. Websites popped up, collecting his most egregious punchlines. One of his big mixtape hits was called “Alphabetical Slaughter:” “A: ASSASSINS AT LARGE ALLEGEDLY.” His narrative songs were similarly unsubtle. This was before Twitter, but he wrote and rapped like lazy Twitter jokes about New York rappers his famous verse on Busta’s “Touch It” remix is the one where he raps about how the city’s five boroughs were personified by each of his fingers (“QUEENS ON MY THUMB, DUDE”).
He was Fabolous without all the social tact. Papoose was too wordy, too cloyingly, self-consciously clever. There was a blend that added a Papoose verse to the end of Nas and Jay-Z’s “Black Republicans,” and it caused a minor sensation on that mp3, he announced the title of his album: The Nacirema Dream. Jive gave him $1.5 million a half-decade before A$AP Rocky got $3 million.
It’s tempting, with hindsight, to see this as an indictment of where the city’s scene was in 2006, but people were excited, and for certain crowds of rap fans in the city and on the internet, mixtapes with his name on them were must-downloads. There was a time when it seemed like Papoose would be the next big rapper to come out of New York.