Ain’t shit changed, but the lack of coast that Tosten Burks adopted.
As Schoolboy readies Oxymoron, as Yeezy teaches K.Dot about leather jogging pants, as Ab-Soul keeps giving guest verses to every blog rapper and his mother’s extended family, as Jay Rock clings to people’s memory, TDE’s next generation extends further introduction. So far, they’re not so much living up to the standard as they are disregarding it. “Ronnie Drake,” Isaiah Rashad and SZA’s first song together, is striking for its stylistic restraint.
Punch too easily could place Rashad in Kendrick’s sage LAlien atmosphere or Ab-Soul’s foggy paranoia or Quincy’s acidic gangbang. Apply the Instagram filter and let the blog cycle roll. Instead, the Antydote fingers twilight keys as Isaiah wearily observes the African-American condition around him. His language is understated, weary, hushed – a 21-year-old whose wisdom weighs on his shoulders.
“They only feel you when you pass away/The eulogy be so moving,” Isaiah says, pointing out the most bitter silver lining. “It’s so youthful,” he says of school conflicts and dope moving, hardly betraying how wistful that trivialization is. Such is the melancholy of a Chattanooga king with poorly tinted windows and a missing bumper on his carriage.
On hook-duty, SZA sizzles like smoke, professing love for all the characters on the street, in case you mistook this ode for a condemnation. She sounds more than comfortable lathering breakbeats with falsetto. These two are both great additions to the family.