A Hip-Hop ‘What If …’

Photo: Courtesy of Quality Control Music/Motown Records

James Blake and Lil Yachty are a lucifer made successful buddy-comedy heaven. The British singer-songwriter and shaper is the go-to achromatic antheral out-of-genre vocalist selling silken hooks to the likes of Jay-Z, Ye, and Travis Scott, an improbable result for an auteur liable for the baroque popular and minimal creation euphony of his 2009 self-titled debut. Lil Yachty has a spot connected his enarthrosis arsenic the latest 20-something rapper dealing with unearned, unrealistic complaints astir lowbrow trap euphony poisoning the good for the much polished craftsmen successful the genre, but the purists’ outrage hasn’t stemmed a tide of breezy hits, coagulated impermanent features, and penning and accumulation jobs for the Migos and Drake. Bad Cameo, an album-length collab betwixt Blake and Yachty, sees the duo matching wits implicit heady, reverb-drenched hip-hop and electronic-music hybrids, which nudge each creator into a much intriguing originative space.

Working unneurotic pushes Lil Yachty further from the confederate and Midwest rap trends acceptable oregon other savvily stalked connected his Lil Boat and Michigan Boat Boy mixtapes, gathering connected the left-field genre spelunking that took spot crossed past year’s divisive psych-rock and funk pivot, Let’s Start Here. It besides turns the leafage connected a dicey agelong of Blake news: He struggled successful March to explicate however Vault, a subscription work helium had pushed arsenic a “nice solution” to streaming platforms’ meager payouts, differs from the preexisting utilities and past caught fume successful June for admitting to hating the saxophone capable to privation to delete the instrumentality and its full publication to euphony history. Bad Cameo casts him successful the relation of ambient and dance-music Sherpa, partnering him with an American foil whose committedness to whimsicality tin marque the much austere Brit’s demure sensibilities consciousness refreshing.

Just arsenic Let’s Start Here tapped the Yves Tumor and Caroline Polachek regulars Justin Raisen and Patrick Wimberly to steer its lysergic pop, Bad Cameo solicits heady, shiftless synthesizer compositions to showcase antithetic dimensions successful Lil Yachty’s voice. He wrote briskly implicit instrumentals by Blake, who tinkered further afterward. The champion songs payment from these differences successful process, seeming catchy and escaped yet cautiously structured. “In Grey,” a six-minute delight, drifts alluringly from synth-and-vocal reverie to a euphoric chill-out groove, similar taking successful a gorgeous agelong of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II and deciding the archetypal installment’s peppier “Xtal” is what your bosom calls for. “Twice” balances sung raps and accumulation that dips into the zesty beats and disorienting vocal manipulation Blake favored aboriginal connected successful his vocation arsenic a DJ and remixer. This draws a tender show retired of Yachty, who leans into the vocal tics of his collaborator successful the aforesaid mode his leaked notation way for Drake’s “Jumbo Shit Poppin” mapped retired a duet for their respective precocious and little registers. Blake is simply a repository of aqueous tones and fey vocals for Yachty, who primitively intended to merchandise Let’s Start Here as 180 under a pseudonym. There’s nary involvement successful hiding his manus this time. Instead, Boat seems funny successful legitimacy. He wants to beryllium seen holding tribunal with a critically acclaimed songwriter and shaper (to the grade that his unpredictable plays tin beryllium telegraphed). His impulsiveness seems to upend Blake’s protracted process, dragging the elder Brit into a much playful abstraction arsenic helium tries to imbue a zany hook from his spouse with a much accepted backing vocal. It tin consciousness arsenic though a opus is coming into beingness portion you’re listening to it, being blurted retired enactment by enactment alternatively than fussed implicit profoundly, arsenic Blake seems to do.

Zipping astir subgenres — mixing and matching ambient, chillout, trap, acerb house, and choral euphony — supplies the brace with gorgeous scenery to chew, distracting from Bad Cameo’s Achilles’ heel: a melodic maturity and professionalism exceeding what the lyrics look susceptible of. “‘Missing Man’ came retired successful 10 minutes,” Blake told Zane Lowe successful a cheeky Apple Music interview. It sounds similar it: “Missing man, they don’t ever cognize what you doin’, they’ll crook and thin distant / Missing man, you conscionable request to reset / Reset, reset, reset.” Sketchlike verses suggest the archetypal drafts of a rapper whose occurrence moving connected the alert tin scan arsenic flightiness, particularly erstwhile Bad Cameo peels backmost its layers to uncover him kindly kicking vaguely New Age–y vibes with each the extent of a whipped-cream pastry arsenic good arsenic the undeniable sweetness. The signifier feels similar little of a liability the busier a way gets. Vampy lyrics suit the 303 bass jam “Transport Me” — “I amusement you the beingness done my lens / I amusement you a duplicate turbo Bеnz / I amusement you what Birkins look similar for your friends” — and “Twice,” successful which Yachty races done a gauntlet of echoing dependable snippets, relishing the state to travel his ain instincts. The medium succeeds successful communicating a consciousness that you could driblet Lil Boat into immoderate concern and he’d float. It gives Blake an excuse to beforehand some the soporific sounds helium explores with the generative sleep-music app Endel and the pop-oriented penning that nets him enactment with manufacture large fish.

This each makes Bad Cameo an uneven listen, the improbable merchandise of intersecting habits and accomplishment sets but complementary flairs for teasing profundity retired of an astir exhausting, soul-searching earnestness. The balances and imbalances connected show are by turns astounding and annoying; these 2 are positively bursting with ideas, occasionally to a fault, but much often to immoderate exhilarating revelation. The hip-hop and club-music blend “Woo” is adjacent tighter and catchier than the champion of Blake’s past album, Playing Robots to Heaven, a dainty for fans who had grown weary of the drippy adult-contemporary emotion songs helium seemed to beryllium settling into successful this decade. Closer “Red Carpet,” a barbershop-quartet performance, champion exemplifies the logic-defying synergy Bad Cameo taps into. One feline emotes astir however Jameela Jamil is much important to him than the trappings of fame, portion the different vents astir catching hellhole increasing up successful the nationalist eye. Do Blake and Yachty travel retired of this odd-couple acquisition loosening up successful their respective solo catalogues? Or is Bad Cameo another frothy one-shot from colorful characters whose disparate goals won’t align truthful neatly again, a rap What if …, an ambient-pop Marvel Team-Up? Their restlessness suggests the latter.