The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. But their musical chemistry is undeniable.
( Daytona comes out nearly 13 years to the day after Common’s Be, where Kanye pushed his Chicago mentor into lusher, more soulful spaces that were similarly ideal.) Kanye’s involvement in the album comes with its drawbacks: He reportedly paid $85,000 for a last-minute cover art change to a macabre and misguided picture from the late Whitney Houston’s bathroom and drops a MAGA-hatted verse that asks if he’s “too complex for ComplexCon”-unlike most of Pusha’s raps, Ye’s is so tethered to the news cycle that it yanks you out of the illusion. There’s nothing on Daytona as avant-garde as the synth-drenched “ Trill,” but the tracks here skew grim and steely, luring him into custom-fitted pockets. Pusha has made a career being an outlet for celebrated producers’ weirdest beats. It’s simply enthralling to hear him twist his tongue around passages like, “Angel on my shoulder, what should we do?/Devil on the other, what would Meek do?/Pop a wheelie, tell the judge to Akinyele/Middle fingers out the ghost, screaming ’Makaveli’” whether the subject matter is played out is beside the point. This leaves Pusha open to charges of being one-dimensional, but, really, he’s a specialist: His writing has as much stylistic and syntactical variety as most of his peers, and few are operating at anything close to a comparable level more than two decades into their careers. He raps, sometimes wittily and sometimes gravely, about: selling drugs and buying luxurious things with the profits the peril and paranoia that comes with selling drugs guilt and, sometimes, his grudges against Lil Wayne and Drake. Carter, Pusha-T does not have an expansive list of topics, nemeses, styles, and tics. The business has shifted several times since the rapper’s heyday with Clipse and the Neptunes in the mid-2000s-rapping about coke is no longer the shortest route to the genre’s cutting edge-but the memory of that second Bush term gives Pusha’s wheelhouse a certain highbrow appeal JAY-Z knew he needed to tap into something similar on 2007’s American Gangster to correct for a disastrous, buttoned-up comeback album.īut unlike Mr.
releases slated for June threatens to swallow everything else alive, Push included, the spare and serrated Daytona should hold up as a near-airtight exercise in flair and focus.
#Neptunes daytona full#
The beats-sample-heavy and produced entirely by Kanye-are uniformly excellent and let you see the seams: It’s like an album full of “Bound 2”s, without the sentimentality.
At just seven songs and 21 minutes, it shirks the bloat and radio concessions of Darkest Before Dawn and, to a greater extent, his 2013 solo debut, My Name Is My Name. In either case, Daytona is Pusha’s best work as a solo artist, a tightly wound record that doesn’t recapture the highs of peak Clipse, but finally makes ideal use of the now middle-aged rapper’s considerable skills.
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