The Alabama rapper has a knack for re-contextualizing popular songs for a specific corner of YouTube
In the world of Rodriguez, the dichotomy of successful pop hits and the smoothed-to-perfection voices that made them so popular are forced up against stories of walking on bullets, food supplied by EBT, and T-Shirts adorned with the faces of dead men. It’s a place where Ruth B. sweetly sings a nursery rhyme-esque passage, “My only friend was the man in the Moon,” while videos of a man pouring cough syrup into a blueberry Faygo bottle and another toting a gun flash across the screen.
This would all fall apart if Rodriguez wasn’t such a captivating storyteller. Blunt, brutal, and mush-mouthed, his narratives tend to focus on the small details and impenetrable references that only those in his orbit could hope to understand. On “Amen,” Rodriguez tells the story of a 13-year-old’s descent into a life of drug dealing and death.
For the last decade, the charts and the nation’s heart have been overrun with rappers chasing the musical textures of R&B crooners, and pop singers desperately trying to mold their career after rappers. Rodriguez exists in a Wild Wild West where sample clearances are an afterthought, using widely recognizable cultural touchstones to lend his street-level songs immediate emotional weight. It won’t always be like this, but for now Rodriguez is creating free of constraints.
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