Let's Start Here. Lil Yachty gives us pop's first masterpiece of 2023.
Anyone who says they were ready for this is straight-up lying.
“the kid is now a man
And the silence is filled with remarkable sounds
This part I've seen in my dreams”
Couldn’t sleep last night, this fucking record rampaging through my head taking over every synapse, as ever with a true game changer like this - not merely a great album, but a masterpiece - my motivation as a critic crumbling under language’s inadequacy to my feelings and senses. Don’t get me wrong, and don’t believe those bullshitters who are inevitably gonna deride LY’s earlier work in preference for this (the old old ‘why can’t more rap music be like this’ narrative that always happens whenever hip hoppers make something adjacent to what passes for ‘tasteful’ among pop cognoscenti) there was tons to commend Lil Yachty’s work before now, even for this inveterate old fart with a man-babyish/adult-infantile prejudicial aversion to male rappers whose first name is Lil.
Yachty, Nas X, and Wayne have all fucked with that prejudice over the years, and there was no denying that Yachty’s work was a particularly intriguing type of ‘bubblegum trap’ as he called it - especially last year’s amazing ‘Poland’ single. That single gave tiny hints that whatever the Atlantan rapper was gonna do next was going to be . . . wayward. Different. You already got the sense he was headed somewhere unique. But even that doesn’t get close to this. 2021’s ‘Michigan Boy Boat’ was an addictively bass-heavy brew that crushed Michigan bite with Atlanta slurp - a really great mixtape that went some way to destroying older rap fans’ anti-mumble anti-soundcloudrapper bigotry - but that was a record I recall in lockdown being fantastic to smoke and drive to, not a record that sucked you in and wiped your mindseyes clear like this one. That record left you satisfied and happy, and its careful craft and musical precision absolutely ixnayed the unfair stereotyping Yachty has always picked up - but this record leaves you wondering whether you can ever be satisfied again, so puckered is your skin to this new plateau of bliss.
“I feel empty, riding on E, A shopping spree may fill the V, V as in void/ All of the things I once enjoyed doesn't bring joy, It just bring noise, it just bring noise”
Like anyone dubious about rappers making albums convivial to white critics, I was prepared for disappointment when reading Yachty trail this album as psychedelic, alternative. The former soubriquet too-often merely means over-produced, the latter is a word close approaching meaning-zero. I was braced for the kind of rap music it’s ‘okay to like’. What I got was heaven injected into every cell, suffusing every drop of air it inhabits. I expected something at least containable but Let’s Start Here properly busts out of every single tiny mental box your listening habits might try and force it into. It’s TOO fucking MUCH for the mind, 2023’s first total pop masterpiece, jaw-dropping TRULY, I felt my jaw unhinge and droop and crash to the floor, sink through the earth, lost. The kind of record that makes you worry that everything you know about music is wrong. The kind of album that makes that uncertainty - that startling enrapturing What The Fuckness - its modus and method and trajectory.
“You've always told me to enjoy my seconds on earth with tea/ The most important moments in life aren't when you're born and when you die/But when you met me, when we became us”
You’ll be lost for words, gurgling, speechless with what you’ve just experienced, but let’s try some. A masterpiece and so the facts, the context, are as relevant or irrelevant as you want. Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, Unknown Mortal Orchestra bassist Jacob Portrait, Jam City, Magdalena Bay and others have production credits. Mac DeMarco, MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser, and the fab Nikolas Hakim get writing credits. These individuals are important but what’s more important is that listening to this record you get a feeling of unitary committment to making something unique, a dawning realisation that almost-accidentally, they are stumbling across new highs, new thrills, new delights in pop. Let’s Start Here doesn’t just entirely eclipse everything Yachty has made before, it eclipses everything ALL of these collaborators have made before. Not a mark in the sand but an abyssal trench, not just a new high-point for all involved but more like they’ve set out to make a pop record and instead built a skyscraper on the moon. Already feels like much of 2023 will be spent circling around this record, only unleashing it when you’re in a safe place where the liquification of your senses won’t imperil you. The scary thing isn’t just how addictive this record is, it’s just how high it gets you. And once you’re in there’s no getting out- Yachty’s insistence that this album should be listened to front-to-back is absolutely dead on cos once it’s spinning you simply can’t step off, you’re paralysed with wonder. So before you dare to drop the needle make sure you have the time to get immersed, engulfed, TAKEN.
“Home is only an idea/I fear it’s costumes that you wear”
Opener ‘the BLACK seminole’ burbles at you on a wave of Laraajiesque synth (by the way in that vein please check out Ibukan Sunday’s amazing new Afro-ambient ‘Mantra’ set on Phantom Limb) before thunking in on an entirely new groove for Yachty, peach perfect wracked prog-soul like the Isley’s started playing slow-core, a hefty yet somehow gaseous funk grind strafed by his gorgeous autotuned vox, the rippling cymbals drawing us into this lysergic mid-track reverie in which the ground, the groove, absonds and evanesces into whorls of mournful synth before he returns, multitracked into traumatic wordless peals of poignancy. The shortest seven minutes of your life. And straight away, there’s no way you’re going ANYWHERE. ‘the ride’ and ‘running out of time’ smear that soundworld even thicker into your consciousness, flow into each other indicating that desire for you to hear this as an unfolding suite rather than a series of tracks, beats somewhere between programmed implacability and analogue feel-ness, the mix a soup of miasmic textures from which elements, shards and hooks can raise their heads and adhere you to the strange structures underneath. I know some older hip hop heads simply can’t get along with LY’s vocals esp when autotuned - I’d say that tracks here like ‘pRETTy’ see some of the most innovative vocal processing I’ve heard since T-Pain went preset-crazy, whorls of oscillating auto-tune vocals utilised less as main melody and more as harmonic texture. ‘:(failure(:’ is a break in the beats, glistening 80s synths and filtron-keys winking out and expiring underneath spoken word musings and cooing b-vox before ‘the zone’ proves a last-gasp moment of calm, spacey funk before the highlights ahead.
“It don't get no bettеr/ Take a picture 'cause wе'll need proof/ Nobody will believe we saw the sunlight”
From that point on there’s this insane ASCENCION to this record, a vertiginous sense that is first picked up in your SKIN, puckered, wracked, swims up to your head, then down to your heart like you’re stepping back into some ancient-futurist cardio-centric zone of thought and feeling. ‘We Saw The Sun’ is just fucking STAGGERING - Yachty using peals of vocals like art-rock guitar lines, summoning the spirits of Faust IV and Arthur Russell and AR Kane in sheer gaseous waves of utterly ravishing beauty. ‘dRIve ME crazy!’ is the most exquisitely tooled homage to Gamble & Huff you’ll hear this side of that sublime new US Girls album that mid-track slips sideways into this dubby, string-laden fade of pearlescent wonder. ‘I’VE OFFICIALLY LOST vision’ is weirder still, a minute of crepuscular Stockhausenesque digi-derangement that then swerves into this pummelling industrial rock slash dreampop like Young Gods produced by Kevin Shields before a plangent, heart-rendingly Joni-ish coda, unfolding under a sky so wide you can hear time and space bend in undulating congress. ‘Say Something’ is Number One Song On Venus, the precision of Y’s lines bubbling out but with each refracted note flickered into this gorgeous drone that suddenly, startlingly stops and swims into the viscous sub-aquatic grooves of ‘paint THE Sky’. By this time you’re not just listening to Lil Yachty differently, it feels like you’re listening to MUSIC differently because it’s so rare to feel utterly surrendered to a record like this, to feel that simultaneous vulnerability to Yachty’s imaginative twists and turns but also to trust every step he leads you on to. And what’s truly spooky is how it feels like he KNOWS how we’re feeling at this point, that we’re somewhat sadly cognizant that we’re approaching the end of this magic spell, so he saves the utterly astonishing ‘sHould I Be’ for this closing suite.
“love feels like butterflies suffocating your insides”
In 168 seconds flat it transports you via this dreamlike neon glide into pop heaven, and at a time when ChatGPT can do all the writing, and AI can do all the making, it’s so curious to be reminded by music so slathered in ‘artifice’ that the immutable fact of an artist’s wilful imagination is an irreplaceable thing, to be reminded that pop is so much more than the sum of its parts or a simple input-output game, can make you feel alive in (and alive TO) 2023 like nothing else. That’s the thing with this record, no matter how jaded a listener you might be, it makes you once again puzzle over music’s enigmatic power, makes you wonder not only how it works, but about your own workings, about the impossibility you’re apprehending of ever working these hooks or sounds out of your system.
“Ugh, hah Fuck, I did way too much drugs, I've been swirlin' and spinnin'/ I could see the sky fall, and I'll lose you/ This little tiny sheet of paper could change your life/It's chemically proven”
There’s alot of flow - back and forth - between these tracks, sometimes to the point where you wonder if track names were really needed, because when you listen to ‘Let’s Start Here’ it almost comes across as one symphonic megamovement, one sustained suite determined to unhinge your preconceptions and habits, one song that charts a druggy night with the love of your life. ‘The Alchemist’ blazes in from ‘Should I Be’ with a punka-stomp that alternates with sighing 80s pop-soul. The closer here ‘Reach The Sunshine’ is an incredible fade - Yachty’s voice cracked and mournful, post-punk guitar and Bill Withers-like mournfulness echoplexed across this vista of folktronic stealth, before synths so thick it’s like Goblin have been whistled up from their grave come in like an ambrosial deluge. The fearless SPACE of the track makes for an amazing end to the record, laughter and lacerating self-exposure dubbed out to the peripheries of your by-now-uber-dilated vision. And those same synth-arpeggios that ushered in the album return, cyclical, beckoning you back to hitting repeat.
Thing is you won’t. First you’ll sit there for a bit just saying FUCK FUCK FUCK and shaking your damn head in time with your soul’s trembling. You’ll step away changed, but you might not return straight away because when you put this record on you are ultimately committing yourself to a trip, a DMT-like oddyssey that you can’t negotiate yourself away from once it’s rolling. ‘Let’s Start Here’ isn’t just an upping of the ante for Lil Yachty, it’s a raising of the standards - or rather a reminder of certain standards - that you might have thought would never be reached again. In 2023 I certainly didn’t expect to feel once again like I felt when I first heard I dunno ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’ or ‘Isn’t Anything’ or ‘Music Has A Right To Children’ or ‘Aquemini’. But that’s how I feel listening to ‘Let’s Start Here’. Nothing so easily dismissable as ‘pivotal’ or ‘future classic’. Rather, like those records, one of those albums that will suffer in future under the soubriquet ‘influential’ but whose true influence won’t be musical, but spiritual. In terms of making you feel holy hell, pop just ISN’T DONE yet. Absolutely miraculous and pop’s first masterpiece of 2023. All hail.
Ho. Lee. Shieeet. Amazing!