rae sremmurd - sremmlife (6 jan 2015)

even grading on the "it's a triple album what did you expect" curve this is really a disappointment :(

idk my current evaluation is it came out a few hours ago and i gotta spend more time with it

On my first playthrough and Swaecation sounds incredible despite its lack of hooks and stand-up lines. The panflutes and guitar tones!

The "chinny chin chin" line in Powerglide really spoils an otherwise great track

I like the sound of Swaecation but that sequence bores me, mostly.

This whole album feels a lot less... focused than their previous two? And I’m not just talking about the 27 tracks. It’s more... something about how they let their guests steal the spotlight on these songs, something that rarely happened before, even when they had great guests.

That being said, I really like all the group album tracks. And a few of the solo tracks. The 3-4 final Jxmtroduction tracks are good.

Swaecation makes me think of Charli XCX's Pop 2

SR3MM proper is the most disappointing disc for me. "Up In My Cocina" is a dull opener, especially by this group's standards, and "Bedtime Stories" is the last thing I want to hear on a Rae Sremmurd album.

Swaecation is hard to criticize because it feels like a hug and it's so sweet and genuine and I love that. But it runs the same basic idea or two into the ground, and I have a hard time believing these are the best possible songs Swae Lee is capable of. It almost feels more like a Future mixtape to me, a myopic snapshot of where an artist's muse is at a very specific moment in their career, rather than a landmark portrait that captures the full scope of his talents.

There's enough good scattered throughout all of these sides that I feel greedy saying I wanted more, but I wanted more. "Touchscreen Navigation" is perfect, though, and "Hurt To Look" is classic

Interesting. I don' think SR3MM's songs are at their best either (I like "Up in my Cocina" more than you do), but it's the one I listen to most while I feel a real dip in my enthusiasm when I get to Swaecation

My expectations were highest for Swaecation, because I wanted it to be a real Swae Lee solo debut and not just the bonus disc it essentially is. I don't think it cashes in on his talent or his buzz the way it could have, but once I balance for all of that I can at least appreciate that it mostly does what it sets out to do.

SR3MM though is just really unfocused and uneven and almost perfunctory at times. It feels like the disc the group shorted as they divided their attention across projects

I feel like Black Beatles was the sound of them arriving and this is the sound of them discovering that they now have to figure out where to go next. There's just less passion to it all. Like they're trying new stuff because they guess they have to and not out of genuine curiosity. There's a great yacht rock album somewhere inside Swaecation but it hasn't really left the shore. (Thugger does, obvs.)

Well I was expecting this album to be a bit patchy and disappointing compared to the last two. Especially after mixed feelings on Migos's bumper album and the fact I've already heard about a fifth of the album already.

I was wrong. It's a thrill-ride and great fun to listen to on shuffle. I've not really had time to check the whole thing out yet but there are already some proper pump your fist moments.

per hits magazine, failed to outperform the leon bridges album released the same week, even w/ streaming numbers added

they’ve never sold albums

That’s true. It strikes me as weird though. The singles aren’t exactly moving like hot cakes either this time around. Why aren’t the kids gravitating towards them? My initial lukewarmness had more to do with sky high expectations than with the actual quality of this album.

i thought they might buck that tendency post-"black beatles" and "unforgettable" but that is true enough

"powerglide" has actually been holding pretty strong, i think its peak position has been deflated by the crazy distortion of the streaming economy rn--drake to an extent, but mostly by cardi's album and especially post malone's album placing every song on the hot 100. if you look at spotify's weekly chart this week it's the 8th most streamed song on spotify not by drake, cardi or post malone... it's just that that means it's only the 26th most streamed song overall. (i think this is true for a lot of songs... "plug walk", "sad" etc.) "guatemala" and "close" were both on the hot 100 too prior to this deluge, i think things might even out in that regard as we get some distance from the carti/post malone albums

i like "guatemala" a lot

me too!

"powerglide" has more room to grow for sure but for now its hot 100 peak seems about right for how much exposure it seems to be getting, more "throw some mo" or "this could be us" than "no type". it is still a streaming-dominated hit and artists that are comfortably/consistently in the spotify top 50 are not really the ones being short-changed in the streaming economy lol. like yeah, big 'event albums' do shake things up a little but it's not tremendously different from when taylor swift would release an album and have every single track clogging up the top 20 on itunes for a week back when itunes was the thing -- basically a blip in the long run.

Whenever "Powerglide" comes on the radio it tends to outclass whatever comes on before or after, but I don't hear it on pop radio. It hasn't crossed over like 'Black Beatles,' so they're back to where we were exactly two years ago.

well, itunes did distort the charts but not in totality the way streaming is doing right now. itunes sales would shoot a song or two into the top 10 but not have 40% of the hot 100 eaten up by ~4 artists. it shortchanges pretty much every artist except those ones.

i don't really consider it a blip on the radar either. it screws with history! especially with distance and as memories get foggier. who is going to be around to tell kids that despite "going #1" nobody actually cared about eminem's "crack a bottle"

anyway i think ppl itt are forgetting that the sremm's chart success has always been very fleeting. album 2 was a mess singleswise until black beatles exploded out of nowhere and they had nothing to follow it up. perplexing pegasus was another flop (tho sounds amazing on the album). i think the comfortably midrange peak of powerglide and probably close and maybe guatemala once things clear out a bit reflects that black beatles cemented their status as a second tier rap act, which is actually nice since again things were looking really shaky in between the first album and black beatles. they might have another song (not from this album) float into the top 10 but they're just... pretty popular? not superstars? this has always been the case. the first album had like 4 radio hits and sold zip.

Swang was actually a pretty good follow up! But absolutely nobody was tipping it as a single when the album dropped. CLOSE, with its Travis Scott opening verse, looks like a hit on paper but it only just dipped in at 98 in the charts before disappearing again. It might reemerge at some point, but still...

wasn't it an extra/exclusive track? Insofar as those things matter anymore.

It was on the «deluxe», which dropped w the album proper. Those bonus tracks were all good iirc.

oh yeah i forgot about swang. i don't like that song at all

😕

lol "crack a bottle". idk, i'd say the main historical distortion comes from the general lack of willingness to let go of peak chart position as the proxy for how 'big' a song or album was and therefore To What Extent It Reflected And/Or Defined The Zeitgeist.

like, if you look at how "crack a bottle" did on the charts week-by-week, you can see the history pretty accurately: it sold a ton for one week (its first) then receded to obscurity quite quickly. same for, like, taylor hicks's "do i make you proud" and so forth. the charts were not really inaccurate to have these songs near or at the top of the charts on the weeks that they peaked, but the general fixation on peaks does lead us to inaccurate conclusions in such cases.

there was a time when chart runs pretty much all had the same 'shape' -- debut at a low-to-moderate position, rise a fairly steady number of positions each week until a plateau is reached, then tumble down rather quickly -- so peak position pretty much could tell you all you needed to know about how well a single performed. that period ended in the 90s, post-soundscan, but our favored ways of representing How The Culture Evolved has not really progressed past the joel whitburn book approach (debut date/peak position/weeks on chart). (the most commonly viewed repositories of distilled chart info, wikipedia articles, have narrowed the focus almost entirely on peak position.)

anyway! i need to spend some time with this album.

The new Swae Lee is full-on afropop, produced and co-written by Tekno:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBioIsLoXoE
Swae Lee ft. Drake • Won’t Be Late

black beatles holds up i think

i miss being excited about Rae sremmurd. The combo of absurdity, suaveness, and unhinged energy was really something when it all lined up.

Loved This weird one off trippie redd Collab

https://youtu.be/ZIPCLWqcYo0

The album hold up.

album yes, black beatles still sounds bad to me.

the "no type" beat is still one of my favorites, that decaying keyboard sound at the beginning that gets swallowed up by the bass

back together again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwra2z-OwB8
Rae Sremmurd • Denial

not loving this tbh

i feel like these guys were ahead of their time but when the moment for their kind of music came it passed them by instead of them grabbing it with both hands

yeah kinda boring

it's a nope from me

Swae Lee seemed like such a ready-made star, but, for whatever reason, apart from a few successful features (and yes, “Unforgettable” with French Montana and “Sunflower” with Post Malone were real blockbusters) he never took off as a solo artist. his promised album has yet to materialize.

this feels like a retreat, and it’s a bit sad to watch, especially since the song isn’t anything special.

I was really hoping for Swae Lee to succeed, all the more so because he was one of the first US artists to try and ride the incoming afropop wave: “Unforgettable” again - which was originally recorded with post-“One Dance” Wizkid - and “Guatemala” in its wake - and “Won’t Be Late”, which had Tekno involvement).

There was also this great afro-adjacent UK remix of “Unforgettable” by producer Jae5 with J Hus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxmZNqqLRV0

i think this song is cute. kind of forgettable and low key for a comeback single, but also the moment (in general) has probably passed them by so i'm not sure our expectations will ever be met... hard to turn back the clock a half-decade plus and still feel fresh and current. but i'm happy they're back

As somebody who tends to enjoy them far more than I should, this is sort of nice. Real low-key... not gonna win anybody over... but not a mess or anything.

It seemed like they had everything lined up for a minute there prior to SR3MM bricking (relatively speaking). But then the choice of singles leading into that project were perplexing and a bit meh (i like pegasus and t'd up just fine, but did somebody think these were hits?)... the album itself was ok but felt a bit loose compared to their best work (or to the then current-ish Ransom 2). This was even before you add in the attached Slim Jxmmi record nobody has listened to since 2018 and the Swae Lee record which felt mostly like him rambling over chill grooves. Powerglide ruled though!

“Powerglide” was awesome, yeah, but I am not sure if I was more into Sremm or Mike WiLL on the first two albums. “Throw Sum Mo” and “By Chance” probably my faves.

Same. "By Chance" is great.

Feel like they both hit a wall (commercially at least) by 2018 or so. Like, they lost some sort of energy or something.
Still some decent tracks, but nothing undeniable after that.

i'm not sure rae sremmurd/mike will lost anything so much as rap started to move away from melody/pop songwriting and towards harder, lyrical, street style rap. out of sheer popularity rap music charts as pop music right now but artists like lil durk, lil baby, gunna, moneybagg yo, polo g make music that is pretty far from i.e. "no type," "black beatles" etc. you can see it too in the way that music by ppl like drake & future have evolved over the same time period.

Yeah. There was certainly a sea change post-Lil Baby/Gunna that knocked a lot of the class of '15/'16 down a few rungs.
I guess I hoped they (Sremm and Mike Will) would find a way to adapt and pivot better than they have (and like MW had done before that).
I like ridiculous just as much (more than?) the next guy, but, interpolating Elvis with Diplo probably ain't the way back to the top for Swae Lee... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6mEXWXeolk

The new album sounds fresh.

I just played “YMCA” (yes, because of its title, what of it?) and I liked it