Luv Is Rage 2

About

There are few songs in 21st-century hip-hop that serve as an artist’s mission statement as clearly as Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3.” In 2017, with a single stroke, Uzi had synthesized the jagged emotionality of the Soundcloud-native rappers bubbling out of South Florida, the melodic trap records emanating from Atlanta, and technical rigor from his native Philadelphia. Beyond the text of the song, its release seemed immediately to be an inflection point, the long-awaited realization of the superstar potential projected onto him from the moment he emerged in the mid-2010. It would be virtually impossible to overstate the song’s impact on Uzi’s career and on rap writ large. Before it was even officially issued as a single, the Soundcloud version of the pleading, pointed track had amassed a giant cult following; when it was finally available through commercial channel, it became a phenomenon far beyond what a no. 7 peak on the Hot 100 could measure. But rather than serving as a business model, “XO Tour Llif3” comes to define <i>Luv Is Rage 2</i>, Uzi’s studio debut from that same year, on a thematic level. That song’s quick pivots of posture and composure—from callousness to tenderne, defiance to outright desperation—are mirrored over and over throughout the LP. See the way “Dark Queen” is at once a loving portrait of Uzi’s mother and an implicitly icy one of him; see how “The Way Life Goe,” with its extended Oh Wonder interpolation, flits from big-brotherly advice to petty woundedne. None of this tonal morphing makes the songs incoherent—it makes them complicated, the way we all are. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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