Video and Audio: August 2020

“If you coughin’ I ain’t tryna be around you”

Gmac Cash: “Coronavirus”

This March 15 release turned out to be more prescient than the bulk of the officials who were paid to be: pro-mask, understanding the necessity of contact tracing slash snitching, haunted by the feeling that we were in for a year of this. His follow-up paean to his governor Big Gretch was more of a regional thing.

Duke Deuce ft. Lil Yachty & Turnt Lil Thadd: “Crunk Ain’t Dead Mob”

One thing that’s been missing from street rap for a while: young men chanting in unison, finding being alive reason enough solidarity. Another: spelling things. Yet another: jumping around in shopping mall food courts.

Charli XCX: “Forever”

In which her union with PC Music finally stops feeling like a marriage of upper-B-list convenience and becomes a very personal kind of computer music. Love-you-always cliches renewed for a generationlet long used to distance.

Shopping: “Initiative”

There’s an uncertainty to their deployment of middle-management speak for liberatory purposes, as if Rachel Aggs’s guitar might break free from her hands and skitter off on eight legs. Though if that happened, Aggs would be the first to applaud.

Breland ft. Sam Hunt: “My Truck” (remix)

Transparent attempt to skrr in on “Old Town Road”’s streaming royalties, with the white guy roped in for the remix providing country cred, yes, but somehow rap cred as well. The novelty is that compared to Lil Nas, Billy Ray, and Breland himself, Hunt’s the best singer and most plausible Bone Thugs fan of the bunch.

Lil Uzi Vert: “That Way”

Now we can see that he’s falling apart from the way that he used to be.

Wussy: “Breakfast in Bed”

Turning the song into a dirge makes it clear how limited the triumph of the chorus is: all that labor, emotional and otherwise, for a fleeting moment of intimacy? And yet it is a triumph at the level that can get you through the week, though heaven knows there are emotionally and cardiologically healthier ways.

Riley Green: “I Wish Grandpas Never Died”

A better insight into conservative sentimentality than you’ll get from whichever Midwestern venture capitalist the National Review has most recently strip-mined. Sure, just about all of Green’s wishes would lead to dystopia, maybe even the high school football one, but nonconservatives who’d ignore the conviction behind them while navigating an electoral system that overweights rural votes would do so at their peril.