That tune and these next two are among my favorites pieces of music from the 21st Century so far.
but let's hear more from the mystifyingly under-revered Culture II
fragments from an unfinished paean
the Migos sound above all distinguishes itself with its flooding insistence of jouissance...
bliss is this music's subject, it is its subjectivity.... things incessantly flood or drip in these songs... the self melts and brims and bubbles and overflows...
the lyrics speak of endless hustle, working hard, the grind... but the feeling is imperial indolence, imperturbable nonchalance, gliding serenity, basking in glory...
the words saying the opposite of the music - or rather, the music (and the fey vocal style - closer to PM Dawn than DMX) contradicts the lyrics....
the lyrics are like a residual element, a hollowed-out signifier of rap-as-was...
but the truth of the music is the woozy gaseous vocal texture - that listless wistful bliss...
no matter how hard-hearted and cold-souled the lyrics appear, the fluttery fluidity of the vocal interplay and its ecstatic texturizing speaks to something else: a vulnerability to bliss...
Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff - seem entranced by themselves, lost in an auto-erotic swirl, draped in jouissance that seems to seep out of their bodies as a mist of Auto-Tuned droplets, a self-swaddling canopy of shivers and moans
there are moments in "MotorSport" and "Top Down on Da NAWF" and "Bosses Don't Speak" - shudders, gurgles, dilated moans - that are cut from the same orgasmic-mystic cloth as Tim Buckley's "Starsailor"...