LIL DURK ANGLING FOR THAT CHARMIN MONEY!

Wake up in the morning, take a piss and grab a strap / Then I wipe my ass and then I pour a cup of Ac

Ayo, I'm fuckin with this new Durk joint a lot mo' than I thought I would! What changed in the time between 300 Days 300 Nights and the Def Jam brand coaster he dropped last summer? If "My Beyonce" is any indication, it's cause he got some Loaf in his life. I know when I'm gettin TLC and nutting regularly I'm happier and more productive, so good for both of 'em.

So not only does he have the best fingerbang jam since "Let Me Hold You," he also one-ups Future's "When you wake up before you brush your teeth / You grab your strap, nigga" line talkinbout takin a piss and wipin his ass! Not to get too fancypants on ya ass, but this is a major advancement of the culture, not unlike when James Joyce dropped the Ulysses mixtape and devoted a few pages to a character taking a shit and wiping his ass. 300 Days 300 Nights also proves Durk's business savvy. He's goin hardbody for that cheesy grits money on "Waffle House," while "Make It Back" seems like a subtler bid for that toilet paper yaper.

Here's hoping this is the beginning of a new trend, where rappers describe da banal details of their morning routine. Rap values realness, and what's realer than rollin outta bed, wiping the cold out ya eyes, sippin on some Folgers and waitin for the BMs to drop? I can't even consider blasting myself until I've had my coffee.

ALL THE YOUNG ZONA MEN

This supposed to be a Zona Man song, but the first two minutes is Future continuing to be the best crooner of his generation.  Zona Man come in talkin bout, "I eat all these niggas / These niggas is turkey / No beef with these niggas," and you like, "SMDH, someone please get this man to an Arby's."  Then Lil Durk takes the reins and michaelboltons the song to its bewildering end.  The whole effect is like you in bed with two Futures makin sweet love n splashin baby oil all over the motherfucker (Johnson & Johnson, none of that off-brand shit), but when you open your eyes it's not even one Future, it's Durk and Zona Man, and that acid you took was mostly dust.

On to sartorial concerns. Future cuttin such a striking figure these days.  Can't front, he got the best hat game since Ghostface did the domepiece Las Vegas revue in "Mighty Healthy."  Even tho I'd be hatin on his look if it was rocked by the tan rubbery substance constituting Johnny Depp, trust that Nayvadius won't get a pass if he ever drops a P on our headz.  Sidebar: if Future is Hendrix, does that mean OG Maco is Arthur Brown?  "U Guessed It" = "Fire," marinate on that while I inhale the aroma.

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BLACK SKINHEADS

Durk never poses, except with his punk vest

When drill first started really poppin my brains told me, "Yo, you should probably sit this one out."  I was in la-la love; my mindstate was more "Sending All My Love" than savage hellscape.  So to all you vociferous boosters, please pardon my relative indifference.  Guess you had to be there.

While I'll never claim to have any great love for drill music, I do respect it for having a coherent aesthetic in an age when most "genres" and "movements" are meaningless, superfluous, or nonexistent -- usually some configuration of the above.  In my 25 years on this planet, I have never seen a form of music inspire such divisive yet equally valid reactions.  Detractors commonly fixate on its nihilism and supposed simplicity, the very same features the cultural groundskeepers of yesteryear once denounced in punk and gangsta rap.  But drill has a more organic integrity than punk, a media creation that pitted together three very different bands as its figureheads.  Gangsta rap engaged the culture wars at large, whereas the debate over drill is largely intracultural.  Conversations tend to focus on debasement of genre rather than society as a whole, an irony that the Calvin Buttses of the world might consider proof of prophesy.

Ten years ago Lil Durk's Remember My Name would have been a grand exercise in dropping the ball, but fortunately for him, major label debuts just don't have the resonance they once did.  Durk's album is a relatively undistinguished project that might have been more at home on DatPiff than Def Jam, as is increasingly the case in an age when the main difference between mixtapes and albums is DMCA complaints.  This could have been a chance to make some kind of statement for drill as a music or movement or diseased stump, but Durk doesn't even give himself the chance to fail spectacularly: he compromises, resulting in an identity crisis of awkward crossover attempts amidst new iterations of his original process.

Which isn't to say the album is a failure.  Durk, like drill itself, may just not be for the pop charts.  In spite of his melodic tendencies, Durk's best music is not welcoming.  It is bleak to the very edge of Gothic, a drab funeral song accompanied by monotonous warbling.  Rather than Gangsta Rap Part Two, Durk and the drillionaires have more in common with the insular tradition of street-punk, from D-beat to the dregs of New York hardcore -- an avant-garde of the working class and not-working class, born of alienation and blight.  These are apocalyptic takes on expendable youth under late capitalism, searching for satisfaction in the mindlessness of violence and intoxicants.

This is war music for the hopeless, and much of its criticism boils down to thinly veiled disdain for the lumpenproletariat having any voice at all.  It's understandable: listen to either genre exclusively for a week, and suddenly the world seems very cold indeed.  What kind of person could subject themselves to anything but small doses?    In its relentless wallop, "500 Homicides" shares more with "The Blood Runs Red" than any superficial similarities it bears to Migos Gang's latest comic-book caper (Duck Tales of the rap game, but that's a diff'ent thinkpiece for a diff'ent day).  More surprising than Durk making concessions is the fact that Def Jam thinks it can sell his dystopian mutation of pop music.  Imperfect as Remember My Name is, I hope he succeeds.