When they’re on a track together, Don Q makes A Boogie sound tougher, and A Boogie makes Don Q sound slicker. I like his dynamic with frequent collaborator Don Q, a more traditional Bronx rap hardnose. This is not a compelling persona, but it’s led to some good music. He makes moody music, lamenting romantic entanglements and snarling that there are too many fake people out there and that it makes him want to go back to robbing. He’s also one of these guys who’s been talking about the travails of fame ever since he got the slightest bit famous.
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(In one of the most disarming moments on Hoodie SZN, A Boogie’s new album, he admits that Drake was once his idol and fondly remembers the time Drake brought him onstage at Madison Square Garden.) A Boogie has a strong sense of melody, and he knows how to make his voice float over a languid, bass-heavy beat. (Even Tekashi 6ix9ine, a largely untalented troll who got over on shock value more than anything else, is a classic “no, fuck you” New York type.) But that wave has also led to someone like A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie - a young New York star who can come across as a massive gravitational void.Ī Boogie, now 23, emerged from the Bronx a few years ago, doing an emotive melodic singsong that owed everything to Drake. In some ways, that’s allowed New York’s rappers to thrive in a post-regional age. Instead, they adapt whatever’s going on in the moment, and the New Yorkness comes through in accent and outsize personality and brash confidence.
They don’t rap over DJ Premier beats, or over beats that sound like late-’90s Tunnel bangers. Since then, we’ve seen a whole wave of New York rap stars - Cardi B, Sheck Wes, even Nicki Minaj to some extent - who never have to work to prove how New York they are. Rocky’s parents had literally named him after one of the all-time pillars of New York rap, but he betrayed no anxiety of influence, drawing on ancestral Southern and West Coast rap almost as an affectation. How could snap music/ringtone rap/trap/drill/jerk/whatever else be so commercially dominant? Didn’t real rap mean anything anymore? Then, around seven years ago, A$AP Rocky emerged as the city’s biggest new star. For many years, after New York found that rap’s focus had wandered elsewhere, the city got surly and defiant. We are deep into the identity-crisis era of New York rap, and something interesting has started to happen.
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