Cool, detached Future heats up T-mobile
THE darting figure up on stage, rhyming about having adult relations with your special lady friend (while wearing Gucci flip-flops, no less) had mastered a highly lucrative new occupation: Rapper as repellent.
Future smiled frequently while delivering words as serrated as a steak knife, his voice sonorous, his subject matter, by contrast, as discordant as the sound of a car muffler backfiring.
The song: “Thought It Was a Drought,” a pharmaceutically enhanced checklist of vices ranging from slinging dope and urinating codeine to recruiting drug mules and practically swan-diving in cash.
Now, Future (born Nayvadius Wilburn) is but one in a long line of hard-nosed rappers who act almost like war correspondents, reporting on all the carnage bloodying the streets they once inhabited. It’s a rugged job and a necessary one: the struggles they chronicle are real and deserve to be documented, as unsettling to outsiders as they may be.
Where Future differs is how ceaselessly derisive his catalog is and how pleasing to the ear he makes all this unpleasantness seem.
That an artist this taunting, dogged and in-your-face can fill a venue as sizable as T-mobile Arena and have the aisles vibrating with bodies in perpetual motion is no small feat.
In a way, all of this was foreseen. Future earned his stage name as an aspiring, 20-something rapper in his native Atlanta, and he’s lived up to the title: His last five records, including a collaboration album with Drake, have all debuted atop the charts. This year alone he delivered a pair of them in consecutive weeks, “Future” and “Hndrxx,” making him the first artist to ever drop back-to-back No. 1 albums.