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Pretty good article here about Future's run in 2015. http://m.noisey.vice.com/blog/future-artist-of-the-year-2015-essay
Love the part where they talk about how Future is miscast by some as solely a turnup artist with no substance...or simply an auto tune mumble rapper.
Those who claim to be the intellects, forward thinking progressive types in hip hop, can't look beyond the surface level with Future. It's funny how they've locked in their minds that he's a certain type of artist, and refuse to look further than that.
Excerpt in the spoiler below:
Love the part where they talk about how Future is miscast by some as solely a turnup artist with no substance...or simply an auto tune mumble rapper.
Those who claim to be the intellects, forward thinking progressive types in hip hop, can't look beyond the surface level with Future. It's funny how they've locked in their minds that he's a certain type of artist, and refuse to look further than that.
Excerpt in the spoiler below:
"Nonetheless, it's also been a year in which Future's music has continued to be misunderstood. He has remained an underdog of sorts, battling perceptions that his music is somehow shallow or just good for turning up. In hip-hop's never-ending push-and-pull debate between meaningless party music and music of substance, he's been cast, even by people who enjoy his music, as the latest alternative to ostensibly more thoughtful artists like J. Cole, Lupe Fiasco, and Kendrick Lamar. But the reason why this is Future's year is that his music has fully escaped that pigeonholing and hit a point where it consistently functions on multiple levels at once. One of the standout lines in the hook of “March Madness,” presumably the type of party song people think of when they reference Future that way, directly addresses one of the year's most discussed social and political issues: “all these cops shooting ****** tragic.” Yes, Future is getting people in the club to sing along to a line about police violence in 2015—not so unlke his supposed opposite Kendrick Lamar. And what is more honest than balancing politics and partying in the span of a few thoughts? We don't go through life choosing one or the other.
Future's music increasingly has come to hit these multiple registers in the same song, which means that even if it's not always as openly political as some of his peers', it has a deep impact. And there are obvious social critiques baked into it. On one very direct level, much of Future's music discusses self-medicating to handle emotional pain and, especially, the psychological toll of poverty, an issue that doesn't get much play in other forms of media. There's a reason Future sounds so jarring next to Drake, a guy who also makes emotionally open club hits: It speaks to a certain experience and perspective to rap “When I was sleeping on the floor you should have seen how they treat me / I pour the Actavis and pop pills so I can fight the demons.” That, too, is not so different from Kendrick Lamar, and, like Kendrick, who should be seen as a peer rather than an adversary, Future has demonstrated an ability to make those feelings resonate on a more universal level. Who hasn't felt lonely or overcome with grief or faced with emotions so daunting they've chosen to run away from them?[ /SPOILER ]
Future's music increasingly has come to hit these multiple registers in the same song, which means that even if it's not always as openly political as some of his peers', it has a deep impact. And there are obvious social critiques baked into it. On one very direct level, much of Future's music discusses self-medicating to handle emotional pain and, especially, the psychological toll of poverty, an issue that doesn't get much play in other forms of media. There's a reason Future sounds so jarring next to Drake, a guy who also makes emotionally open club hits: It speaks to a certain experience and perspective to rap “When I was sleeping on the floor you should have seen how they treat me / I pour the Actavis and pop pills so I can fight the demons.” That, too, is not so different from Kendrick Lamar, and, like Kendrick, who should be seen as a peer rather than an adversary, Future has demonstrated an ability to make those feelings resonate on a more universal level. Who hasn't felt lonely or overcome with grief or faced with emotions so daunting they've chosen to run away from them?[ /SPOILER ]
