First & Fifteenth is a column by the Los Angeles-based critic Paul Thompson, who reviews new and notable rap music twice a month for Audiomack World.
Sharc & Pi’erre Bourne — Sharc Wave
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Sharc Wave will not sit still—it slithers and molts and molts and molts, like a snake that remembers how to log onto DatPiff. The Atlanta-based Sharc is closer to 30 than 20, but he and Pi’erre Bourne ping-pong across the rap stratosphere as it existed from the mid-2000s through the present. Crucially, there is no space left between each track, so that riffs on plug and imperfect recollections of DJ Toomp maximalism are made to seem like inevitable extensions of one another; so that “Members” can reimagine mid-2010s Memphis rap as the raw pulp for New York drill beats; so that cloud rap can be briefly reborn as something slightly more terrestrial. While its view of the genre is expansive, the pace makes it feel like those far-flung borders are collapsing in on the listener.
Sometimes Sharc gestures toward the great synthesists of the past. “Miami,” with its near-monotone juxtaposed against the wailing vocal sample, makes him sound like a Max B descendent who’s only slightly more self-conscious about his singing voice. Unlike Max, though—unlike nearly any rapper I can think of—the nouns in his music are all more or less value neutral, Disney On Ice tickets and handguns free to mingle as they see fit. It’s tempting, in light of that quality and the radical omnivorousness of the beats, to frame this as a Pi’erre Bourne project with a conveniently moldable MC at its center. But Sharc’s turns of phrase and tone are acute enough to suspect that he might be the one yanking threads from the past.
Don Trip — “Before and After”
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The origin story of Step Brothers, the almost absurdly excellent duo that paired Don Trip with Starlito beginning in the mid-2010s, was that each Tennessee native had gone through the major-label meat grinder and come out leaner, sharper, more misanthropic, more honest. Lito, from Nashville, had signed to Cash Money under a different stage name between Carter installments II and III. Trip, from Memphis, found himself doing a brief stint on Interscope a half-decade later. But more than the hard-won industry wisdom, uproarious jokes, and delightfully knotty crime narratives, Step Brothers records were defined by shattered relationships, the shards of which littered their verses, making each artist sound wounded even adopting an aggressive posture.
“Before and After” cuts through that scar tissue to find what’s still soft and vulnerable underneath. Taken from Trip’s new Die Another Day EP, it’s the sort of song that would be disastrously maudlin in lesser hands—too writerly, too sincere, too tidy. Not so with Trip. “Every time I have a child,” he raps, “I feel like I’ve been reborn,” his delivery of the last word contorting into the same exultance as when he boasts of treating a bank “like a resort.” When he says, over the pointedly Gothic beat, that he’s “feeling better than ever before,” you’re tempted to doubt him—but can’t.
