(Even at his Blue Slide Park nadir, Miller was working with adventurous producers like Clams Casino and Young L. That’s also true of the production, most of which is from Miller himself. The running time is excessive, but it helps you slip into deep zone-out territory, turning it into a soundtrack for staring out the window until you wonder where the entire afternoon went. (Earl Sweatshirt: “Don’t approach me with nothing that isn’t money or breakfast.”)īut heard in the right light, all those weaknesses become strengths. He doesn’t have the best line on his own mixtape. He makes extremely goofy cultural references: “I’m a magnet for them zeros, call me Edward Sharpe.” His production aesthetic is getting progressively more faded and numb, moving into muffled spacey jazz that practically strangles the possibility of adrenaline ever kicking in. He brags, “I did it all without a Drake feature,” on the same tape where he has a Rick Ross feature. There’s the line, early on, where he says, “If I ain’t in your top 10, then you a racist,” which, even tongue-in-cheek, is just dumb. There’s the length - 90 minutes, when it could easily be half that. If you’re so inclined, you can still find things to hate on Faces, Miller’s pretty-great new tape. Because on Sunday, he released an endless ’90-minute resin-scraping odyssey that’s easily the best thing he’s ever recorded. And even when Miller started hanging out with Earl Sweatshirt and adapting a pretty great loopy-non-sequitur flow, I still held him in a certain suspicion after all, it was probably possible to be friends with Flying Lotus and still be a dickbag, right? Well, Miller is not a dickbag - or, if he is, he hasn’t let it stop him from becoming a great rapper. When Miller’s Blue Slide Park album rode a slow sales week to a Billboard #1, my hate reached ecstatic levels. The early-’90s New York rap great Lord Finesse sued Miller for using one of his old beats on a mixtape track, and even though the lawsuit could have (and sort of did) throw the entire concept of mixtapes into lawsuit-fearing stasis, I half-rooted for Finesse. Love And Special Sauce, which is probably the easiest and most direct way to convince me to hate another human being and which said bad things about Miller’s whole approach to rap. I watched an interview where, by way of bragging about his openmindedness, Miller talked about liking G. I watched his YouTube videos just to hate them. I got used to hating on him, relied on it. It was like this guy was following me around and bothering me. And because he was all over the place at SXSW that year, I somehow saw him play the very same awful show again when I was waiting for some other rapper to come out. At SXSW a few years ago, while waiting for Big K.R.I.T., I saw him play one of the worst rap shows I have ever seen in my life, and I have seen some real doozies. Here was this annoying bemused-goon Bob Marley poster-type motherfucker who came out of nowhere and rode the Wiz Khalifa wave to fratty stoner-rap stardom.
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