![]() ![]() ![]() It succeeds in fits and starts: There are pleasingly stoned songs like “10 Piece” and there’s the pulsing Problem collaboration called “Getting Loose.” But the tape is marred by rocky production (there are hammy drums and goofy synths) and occasionally lets Wiz sink too far into that pit of oversold, underwritten punch lines. Ten years after How Fly, 2009 aims to capture the bubbling nostalgia for early Obama-era rap. Wiz seldom feels part of the conversation, but has a better relationship with Maroon 5 than the rappers who do. 1 in “Black & Yellow.” In the years since, he’s drifted into a strange lane - one that runs largely parallel to the rest of mainstream rap, but which still allows him to sell out stadiums. But Atlantic pushed Wiz to the top of the pop charts almost immediately after announcing his signing, and by the time Kush & Orange Juice was 18 months old, Wiz had three top-ten singles, including a No. The best of these, called How Fly, paired him with Curren$y. By the time he broke through, at the peak of the blog-rap era, with 2010’s Kush & Orange Juice (a good mixtape elevated by revisionism and nostalgia), the Pittsburgh native had already put out a series of promising records with winking titles like Flight School and Burn After Rolling. There’s a similar, though far lazier and far more profitable, mechanism at work with Wiz Khalifa. The Pilot Talk trilogy, his work with the Alchemist, and the slew of hazily poised songs scattered through RSS feeds for years on end made him a sort of cult hero. ![]() ![]() The New Orleans native has been kicking around since the apex of No Limit Records but established himself, in the latter half of the 2000s and throughout this decade, as one of rap’s most reliably good-to-great workhorses, churning out dozens of albums and mixtapes that are often inventive and always hypnotic. It’s hard to romanticize consistency, but if anyone has been able to work steadiness into his own myth, it’s Curren$y. ![]()
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