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.

RXKNEPHEW — Till I’m Dead

It’s tempting to throw up your hands and call everything “postmodern.” And indeed, RXKNEPHEW’s music understands and exploits the fractured nature of the internet, the collapse of context, the atomization of people and their interests. This seems to inform even the smallest aesthetic choices the Rochester native makes: take “1000MPH,” the second song from his new album, Till I’m Dead, where overlapping punch-ins create a fugue of tossed-off jokes, pop cultural artifacts as talismans of aging, and men who get out of jail and log immediately onto Uber to make a little money. It’s a disorienting approach to songwriting—at times undercutting itself by warping profundity into a joke, at others exhilarating for the way that slipperiness gets at an underlying truth about Neph’s brain and ours. At one point on “1000MPH,” he scoffs at those who suggest he make his songs more legible, more pop-oriented by adding hooks to them. “I duck, weave, jab,” he explains.

But there’s something plainer at the center of Neph’s music: a world-weariness that makes his ebullient delivery scan as a coping mechanism. “Me and my mama do not got a bond,” he raps on “All I Had Was a Bean”; “Having dreams that they coming to get me,” he admits between dance club drums on “Critical.” Poverty and incarceration are flashpoints in Neph’s writing, but both are secondary to the pain caused by fractured relationships. “Baby mama left me—still love her,” he will admit, bars before lashing out at the same woman. Neph’s work can be uproariously funny or deeply sad—or, not infrequently, sad for being so funny.

For all the winking cartoon exaggeration that makes its way into his songs, Neph continues to be one of the only musicians who’s honest about money on record. (Even a cursory listen to Till I’m Dead would confirm that it’s $7,500 to book him for a show.) His sincerity about how central money is to his life makes little moments of indulgence—not just consumptive ones, but the times he writes his name “in cursive” at the bank—seem excessive in their luxury. Whether the joy that’s apparent in those lines is real or yet another put on is beside the point. The inscrutability is not just Till I’m Dead’s defining trait, but its central topic—and a mirror image of the way he feels about those on the other side of the .wav files. “Do they love me or they hate me?” he asks on “Neph Vs the Universe.” “I can’t tell.”

Lil Keed — “Self Employed”

Last spring, less than a week after Young Thug, Gunna, and 26 other “members and associates” of Thug’s Young Stoner Life label were arrested in a sweeping, 56-count RICO indictment, Lil Keed died in a Los Angeles hospital from complications due to eosinophilia. He was 24 years old. (The Atlanta native, born Raqhid Jevon Render, was not named in the indictment.) Though Thug’s style has proven virtually impossible to replicate in full, aspects of it have been isolated, metabolized, and used as the basis for entire strains of rap that have emerged over the past decade. See Lil Baby’s rolling monotone or Yung Kayo’s technicolor exuberance. Keed, one of Thug’s beloved proteges, skewed toward the latter sound. But where the slightly younger Kayo threatens, at times, to come entirely unmoored from the rap lineages that lead to his electronic-adjacent endpoint, Keed synthesized a shimmering, digital approach with one indebted to the Atlanta street rap from which he, Thug, et al. were born.

The lyrics for “Self Employed,” Keed’s new, posthumous single, read like de rigueur boasts and are delivered as if by aliens who are always in a good mood. It’s from a school of rap that feels like the promise of the mid-aughts internet finally, fully realized: glitchy but fluid, pop that sounds as if everyone involved had just finished crying. The innovation here is of technique and performance—but there is also something interesting at play in the writing, where long narrative arcs are not eschewed entirely, but rather compressed into a bar or two at a time. “I ain’t got no diploma/Tell my teacher, ‘Would you look at that?’” Keed raps at the end of the song’s final verse, seeming to set up the sort of defiant anecdote that has dotted rap songs going back decades. Instead, he turns back inward. That verse’s last line is, simply, “I remember sitting in the back,” the thought allowed to drift off, to imply, to linger.

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