https://www.vulture.com/2019/07/best-new-rap-music-big-sean-single-again.html
Where Does Big Sean Fit in Rap?
By Paul Thompson
He’s not only survived the sea changes in pop-rap sounds this decade, but navigated them deftly — at least in fits and starts.Photo: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
Every week, Vulture runs through the best, most interesting, and sometimes most confusing rap releases and other news. In this installment: Big Sean’s return, Tyler the Creator baffles Funkmaster Flex with a freestyle, Chance the Rapper’s debut album, Drakeo the Ruler gets acquitted of murder charges, and more.
Big Sean, “Overtime” & “Single Again”
Last week, Big Sean returned with a pair of singles: the small, moody “Overtime,” and “Single Again,” a summer hit by design. Both are slated for release on Don Life, his fifth album, which is due in September and which will be his first solo record since February 2017. (He released a surprise collaboration project with the producer Metro Boomin in December of that same year.) Alongside these new drops, Sean addressed his fans directly on Twitter, referring to a period of anxiety and depression followed by one of personal growth. “I think at one point I stopped having fun with life and it became a burden,” he wrote, before urging his audience to find happiness within themselves and to get tested for food allergies.
Critically speaking, Sean has come to occupy a strange space: He’s retained the careening, run-on sentence style that’s a hallmark of so much Detroit rap, and yet is seen as a sort of control-group commercial rapper, his tics not so much regionalisms as they are part of the scaffolding of pop radio. He’s nominally an A-list star whose music doesn’t inspire strong reactions, positively or otherwise, outside of his core fan base and those who like to turn him into a cruel Twitter joke. His early-career singles were buoyed by outsiders — by Chris Brown, by Nicki Minaj, by Kanye, and Pusha, and Jay. The biggest and most creatively exciting song from his first half-decade, “I Don’t Fuck With You,” was a DJ Mustard master class that Sean allowed E-40 to steal. And when Kendrick Lamar’s “Control” verse dominated the rap universe for weeks on end in 2013, the fact that it was a bonus track on a Big Sean album was thrown quickly to the footnotes.
The Big Day, Chance the Rapper says of his new work that “every track could be the outro,” which is kind of the problem. Where a raw, no-subtext sentimentality was a compelling undercurrent for the reckless youth shit on Acid Rap, here it tips too often into the saccharine, casting Chance as a well-meaning, well-off friend who truly believes he figured it all out before he turned 27. It’s an album about marriage that seems to celebrate rather than prod at the institution, which is often endearing, even while it sometimes makes Chance sound like a youth pastor desperate to convince the cooler teens that the Lord is the biggest bae of all. The Big Dayis musically varied, but Chance’s bag of vocal tricks — of stops and starts and spoken-word cadences and breaks into song — is deployed far too predictably.
Where Does Big Sean Fit in Rap?
By Paul Thompson
He’s not only survived the sea changes in pop-rap sounds this decade, but navigated them deftly — at least in fits and starts.Photo: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
Every week, Vulture runs through the best, most interesting, and sometimes most confusing rap releases and other news. In this installment: Big Sean’s return, Tyler the Creator baffles Funkmaster Flex with a freestyle, Chance the Rapper’s debut album, Drakeo the Ruler gets acquitted of murder charges, and more.
Big Sean, “Overtime” & “Single Again”
Last week, Big Sean returned with a pair of singles: the small, moody “Overtime,” and “Single Again,” a summer hit by design. Both are slated for release on Don Life, his fifth album, which is due in September and which will be his first solo record since February 2017. (He released a surprise collaboration project with the producer Metro Boomin in December of that same year.) Alongside these new drops, Sean addressed his fans directly on Twitter, referring to a period of anxiety and depression followed by one of personal growth. “I think at one point I stopped having fun with life and it became a burden,” he wrote, before urging his audience to find happiness within themselves and to get tested for food allergies.
Critically speaking, Sean has come to occupy a strange space: He’s retained the careening, run-on sentence style that’s a hallmark of so much Detroit rap, and yet is seen as a sort of control-group commercial rapper, his tics not so much regionalisms as they are part of the scaffolding of pop radio. He’s nominally an A-list star whose music doesn’t inspire strong reactions, positively or otherwise, outside of his core fan base and those who like to turn him into a cruel Twitter joke. His early-career singles were buoyed by outsiders — by Chris Brown, by Nicki Minaj, by Kanye, and Pusha, and Jay. The biggest and most creatively exciting song from his first half-decade, “I Don’t Fuck With You,” was a DJ Mustard master class that Sean allowed E-40 to steal. And when Kendrick Lamar’s “Control” verse dominated the rap universe for weeks on end in 2013, the fact that it was a bonus track on a Big Sean album was thrown quickly to the footnotes.
The Big Day, Chance the Rapper says of his new work that “every track could be the outro,” which is kind of the problem. Where a raw, no-subtext sentimentality was a compelling undercurrent for the reckless youth shit on Acid Rap, here it tips too often into the saccharine, casting Chance as a well-meaning, well-off friend who truly believes he figured it all out before he turned 27. It’s an album about marriage that seems to celebrate rather than prod at the institution, which is often endearing, even while it sometimes makes Chance sound like a youth pastor desperate to convince the cooler teens that the Lord is the biggest bae of all. The Big Dayis musically varied, but Chance’s bag of vocal tricks — of stops and starts and spoken-word cadences and breaks into song — is deployed far too predictably.
