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.

Lil Yachty — “Poland”

The attempts—by the artist himself and the label/publicity apparatus working on his behalf—to position Lil Yachty as the voice of a generation were never going to work. In the run-up to his 2017 major label debut Teenage Emotions he was pitched as an adolescent whisperer, a rapper joyous and unencumbered in ways 25-year-olds could never understand. Whether you can locate this quality in his music is sort of beside the point. The problem with the frame is that it assumes Yachty’s music hinges on long arcs of narrative or theme. It doesn’t. Yachty seemed to figure that out before any of the executives or publicists tasked with selling him to the public.

The common dichotomy is between album artists and singles artists, but Yachty operates on an even smaller scale, the appropriate unit of measure being the tiny moments within songs where he does something strange or endearing enough to buoy the whole thing. (This is why his mixtape from last year, Michigan Boy Boat—an extended riff on the rambling rap styles spilling out of Flint and Detroit—was so surprisingly effective. He lives to deliver minor, impish variation.)

“Poland,” a demo that was apparently leaked early this month and which has now been sanctioned by Yachty with an official release, is so slight that it barely exists. It runs all of 83 seconds, has a single, eight-bar verse—one line of which is, simply, “phew, phew, phew”—and a chorus that is one line repeated three times. And yet the song has become one of the few points of consensus in hip-hop this year, and was so even before it got swallowed by the meme-industrial complex. That six-word hook (“I took the Wock to Poland”) is delivered so wistfully, with a wavering bravado, that it injects real pathos into the routine importation of promethazine to the Eastern bloc.

Quavo & Takeoff — Only Built For Infinity Links

The gossip, personal and professional, that swirls around the release of Quavo and Takeoff’s Only Built For Infinity Links is too banal to detail. The third installment in the Migos’ Culture series, released last summer, found the trio caught in the sort of quicksand that ensnares so many established stars, somewhere between gauche trend-hopping and equally undignified nostalgia and self-mythology.

And yet! The typically long, unimaginatively-titled LP from the two Migos who are still on speaking terms is the best thing to come from any combination of the group’s members in years, a punishing, percussive effort that makes smart use of the original lineup’s gruffest and flightiest voices.

The rash of rap songs that sample rap and R&B from around the turn of the century has yielded predictably little compelling material (the “So Fresh So Clean” flip that comes four songs into Infinity Links works as an exercise while failing, as virtually all songs of this type do, to rise above novelty status). But the album opens with a flip of Ten Wheel Drive and Genya Ravan’s “Ain’t Gonna Happen,” the sound that provided the architecture for the Dynasty album’s “1-900-Hustler,” a posse cut whose careening energy Quavo and Takeoff channel more often than not throughout. Complete with guest turns from the still-incarcerated Young Thug and Gunna, Birdman, and mentor Gucci Mane, the North Atlanta natives sound reinvigorated in a time where they should be anything but.

Remembering Takeoff

Lil Yachty & Quavo, Takeoff: First & Fifteenth