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Q spends the album capturing out sparks on the edges of the rails with out ever letting the prepare tip over. Centerpiece “oHio” has its personal three-act construction that flirts with the epic scale of prog. A grainy funk beat wafts in for the primary third, as Q hints at near-death experiences earlier than chopping to flexes about his AmEx and getting head in Paris. Simply as rapidly, he’s slinging jokes (“Nigga, your bitch bought a damaging ass!”) on a fast-paced synth beat that skirts into lounge-jazz territory the place he and Freddie Gibbs commerce barbs in regards to the pitfalls of fame and marriage over a piano and saxophone waltz. All of this occurs within the span of 5 minutes. The push of kinds, tones, and themes would overwhelm a lesser artist and render the entire tune a damaged, soupy mess. However Q holds courtroom, grinning his manner by the peaks and valleys.
The sheer quantity of modes Q is able to switching between stays astounding. However Blue Lips by no means feels gaudy or overly involved with magnificence. None of it sounds made for the golf course or for soirées on the seaside home. These are aggressive, revealing, and infrequently messy songs in regards to the intersection of success and the underlying damage from a sordid previous it’s usually used to hide. For each kick-in-the-door anthem just like the cop-blasting “Pig Toes,” or the giddy look-at-me-now-ness of “Foux,” Q will spend a observe like “Germany ‘86”—named for the place and when he was born—reminiscing on his father abandoning his household and the road life he inherited because of this.
Ever the blunt lyricist, Q’s writing has change into extra curt throughout the board, making each flex about jewellery land with as a lot affect as probes into his self-confidence. A tune like “Blueslides” is a microcosm of Q’s writing at its most economical, bending gentle wordplay about despair and desperation round wilting piano and trumpets. Its second verse options a number of bars chastizing listeners for turning their backs on Kanye West, crudely chalking up his final half-decade of controversy to a rising indifference towards psychological well being advocacy. Although it’s an oversimplification of many sophisticated points (and loads of ignorance and bigotry), the damage behind the admission is actual. In context, the bars spotlight one of many album’s, and Q’s, biggest considerations: the struggles of getting every little thing on the planet and nonetheless not with the ability to outrun your issues.
Close to the start of “Film,” there’s a short vocal pattern taken from Ralph Bakshi’s 1975 cult traditional Coonskin, and that movie’s imperfect candy-colored bacchanalia is perhaps the closest analogue for Blue Lips’s model of chaos. Bakshi’s purpose was to convey the pains, pleasures, and racism of Seventies interior cities to life in lurid element. Whereas Q’s ambitions aren’t that lofty, the album’s frenetic pacing and writing match the mould all the identical. A world’s value of remorse and enjoyable is squeezed into just below an hour, and other than just a few hiccups—Devin Malik’s opening verse on the in any other case exhilarating “Again n Love” is a very harsh pace bump—hardly a second is wasted. It doesn’t simply push Q previous the crossroads he was at pre-pandemic, it reaffirms him as one in every of mainstream rap’s most partaking and daring stylists. Few MCs, on his label or elsewhere, are able to firing in so many alternative instructions and hitting this many targets without delay with out sounding out of their depth, however Q corrals the ups and downs of his lavish way of life right into a deliriously entertaining joyride.
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