So Necessary: DaBaby Is the True Star of Post Malone’s ‘Hollywood’s Bleeding’
The “Suge” rapper brings a necessary dose of magnetism to Posty’s “Enemies.” Plus: Travis Scott’s doc is beautifully boring, Danny Brown airs some “Dirty Laundry,” and Mario thinks twice about thoughts and prayers.
Because he has nothing better to do with his time, each week, Micah Peters riffs on the most awe-inspiring, confounding, addictive, or otherwise hilarious moments from the week in music. This week:
DaBaby coolly devouring Post Malone’s “Enemies”
Nothing else on Hollywood’s Bleeding rises to “Sunflower — Spider Man: Into The Spider-Verse” level of undeniable, but “Enemies” does come remarkably close. Most of the album is maudlin or otherwise sounds as though it was masterminded by someone with “Always Tired” and “Stay Away” face tattoos, but the production on “Enemies” is bright and slightly antic by contrast, and the hook is plenty of fun to hurl out of the windows of your car: “Used to have friends now I got enemieeeeees / used to keep them close but now they dead to meeeeee.”
Then DaBaby shows up and relegates Posty to window dressing, using that dronish, drawly flow and sheer magnetism that lets him get away with lines like “friends are like autumn, every year they leavin’.” “Sunflower” is Swae Lee’s song. “Enemies” belongs to DaBaby.
The first minute or so of Travis Scott’s Look Mom I Can Fly
In one episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Kris Jenner gets really into reading, and recommends a book on architecture to Kim that’s “so interesting … and boring.” The book in question is a coffee table book. I struggled to put that scene out of mind while watching Travis Scott’s new Netflix documentary—much like how you could page through a giant, glossy hardcover about Italian architecture and not strengthen your understanding of Palladianism, it’s possible to sit through Look Mom I Can Fly’s entire 90-minute runtime and learn absolutely nothing about Travis Scott. It is, however, full of stuff that could confirm what you already think of him: Look Mom begins—begins—with a straight-to-camera night-vision vlog about “Carousel” that’s interrupted by a massive roller coaster drop. Later, there’s a hilarious title card that just reads “AFRICA”—it’s only when the camera draws in dramatically on the back of some merch that we know we’re looking at a tour stop in Johannesburg.
There’s a fair amount of studio and concert footage from the Astroworld recordings and subsequent tour, but that’s basically all there is—the film amounts to an infomercial, but with a lot of color and noise and cool-looking excess. It’s so interesting, but you can turn it off at any time.
Lil Nas X’s “Panini” video
In the “Panini” music video, Skai Jackson of Disney Channel, internet, and G.I. Joe: Retaliation fame is chased—no, haunted—by Lil Nas X in an exosuit, in a fictional world I would describe as “Blade Runner adjacent.”
The premise is like that one, now-ancient Twitter joke construction: The year is 2037, and the precious little content having nothing to do with Lil Nas X likely involves a Common voiceover about AI. Nas X hawks Beats headphones and Fiat compact cars on massive 3-D hologram billboards and dances on the wings of commercial flights. Skai isn’t safe from him anywhere, and eventually accepts that one cannot opt out of Lil Nas X, our new media overlord, at which point he summons—with his great internet powers—a garden full of bonsai trees and flowers. It’s a serene Lil Nas X oasis imagined in a Lil Nas X desert, by Lil Nas X. Skai is you, Skai is me, Skai is all of us, is the joke.
Mario’s earnest five-second prayer for the victims of Hurricane Dorian, in all his jewelry, by a fireplace
You know how your parents would tell you to say grace silently at the dinner table and you’d just close your eyes for a couple seconds, even though you already had a spoonful of potato salad in your mouth?
Mario—“Let Me Love You” Mario—posted the above video to Twitter with the caption “Pray for the Bahamas,” and was rightfully roasted into deleting said tweet. How many times do we have to relearn that thoughts and prayers are two things that should be offered up in private, where people aren’t looking for solutions?
Any 20 seconds from Danny Brown’s “Dirty Laundry”
“Dirty Laundry” begins with Danny Brown gassing himself up in the mirror before a sloppy night of newly-divorced-level debauchery. “Got one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel, but we still out here livin’ like a doctor,” he says, shimmying like Bucknasty from “The Time Haters.” Later, he stomps out Leo Fitzpatrick.
The first single from his forthcoming uknowhatimsayin? album is produced by Q-Tip, who’s supposed to be executive-producing the entire thing. “Dirty Laundry” is an exhibition in what a wonky, adaptive rapper like Brown and a storied producer with at least a few left turns left to make like Q-Tip can accomplish together. Uknowhatimsayin? is due out in October.
BONUS: Wheezy Beats says Bon Iver gave him “the worst weed I ever had in my life”
The most recent edition of the New York Times’ excellent “Diary Of A Song” series explores how “iMi,” from Bon Iver’s latest album, came together. Times pop critic Joe Coscarelli was gracious—nay, generous enough to share the best revelation that didn’t make the cut, which was that Bon Iver smokes BIG Snickelfritz, according to frequent Young Thug collaborator Wheezy Beats.