A Hip-Hop ‘What If …’
James Blake and Lil Yachty’s new album is as astounding as it is annoying.
James Blake and Lil Yachty are a match made in buddy-comedy heaven. The British singer-songwriter and producer is the go-to white male out-of-genre vocalist selling silken hooks to the likes of Jay-Z, Ye, and Travis Scott, an unlikely outcome for an auteur responsible for the baroque pop and minimal dance music of his 2009 self-titled debut. Lil Yachty has a chip on his shoulder as the latest 20-something rapper dealing with unearned, unrealistic complaints about lowbrow trap music poisoning the well for the more polished craftsmen in the genre, but the purists’ outrage hasn’t stemmed a tide of breezy hits, solid guest features, and writing and production jobs for the Migos and Drake. Bad Cameo, an album-length collab between Blake and Yachty, sees the duo matching wits over heady, reverb-drenched hip-hop and electronic-music hybrids, which nudge each artist into a more intriguing creative space.
Working together pushes Lil Yachty further from the southern and Midwest rap trends set or else savvily stalked on his Lil Boat and Michigan Boat Boy mixtapes, building on the left-field genre spelunking that took place across last year’s divisive psych-rock and funk pivot, Let’s Start Here. It also turns the page on a dicey stretch of Blake news: He struggled in March to explain how Vault, a subscription service he had pushed as a “nice solution” to streaming platforms’ meager payouts, differs from the preexisting utilities and then caught smoke in June for admitting to hating the saxophone enough to wish to delete the instrument and its entire contribution to music history. Bad Cameo casts him in the role of ambient and dance-music Sherpa, partnering him with an American foil whose commitment to whimsicality can make the more austere Brit’s demure sensibilities feel refreshing.
You could drop Lil Boat into any situation and he’d float.
Just as Let’s Start Here tapped the Yves Tumor and Caroline Polachek regulars Justin Raisen and Patrick Wimberly to steer its lysergic pop, Bad Cameo solicits heady, shiftless synthesizer compositions to showcase different dimensions in Lil Yachty’s voice. He wrote briskly over instrumentals by Blake, who tinkered further afterward. The best songs benefit from these differences in process, seeming catchy and loose yet carefully structured. “In Grey,” a six-minute delight, drifts alluringly from synth-and-vocal reverie to a euphoric chill-out groove, like taking in a gorgeous stretch of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II and deciding the first installment’s peppier “Xtal” is what your heart calls for. “Twice” balances sung raps and production that dips into the zesty beats and disorienting vocal manipulation Blake favored early on in his career as a DJ and remixer. This draws a tender performance out of Yachty, who leans into the vocal tics of his collaborator in the same way his leaked reference track for Drake’s “Jumbo Shit Poppin” mapped out a duet for their respective upper and lower registers. Blake is a repository of aqueous tones and fey vocals for Yachty, who originally intended to release Let’s Start Here as 180 under a pseudonym. There’s no interest in hiding his hand this time. Instead, Boat seems interested in legitimacy. He wants to be seen holding court with a critically acclaimed songwriter and producer (to the extent that his unpredictable plays can be telegraphed). His impulsiveness seems to upend Blake’s protracted process, dragging the elder Brit into a more playful space as he tries to imbue a zany hook from his partner with a more traditional backing vocal. It can feel as though a song is coming into existence while you’re listening to it, being blurted out line by line rather than fussed over profoundly, as Blake seems to do.
Zipping around subgenres — mixing and matching ambient, chillout, trap, acid house, and choral music — supplies the pair with gorgeous scenery to chew, distracting from Bad Cameo’s Achilles’ heel: a melodic maturity and professionalism exceeding what the lyrics seem capable of. “‘Missing Man’ came out in ten minutes,” Blake told Zane Lowe in a cheeky Apple Music interview. It sounds like it: “Missing man, they don’t ever know what you doin’, they’ll turn and lean away / Missing man, you just need to reset / Reset, reset, reset.” Sketchlike verses suggest the first drafts of a rapper whose success working on the fly can scan as flightiness, especially when Bad Cameo peels back its layers to reveal him kindly kicking vaguely New Age–y vibes with all the depth of a whipped-cream pie as well as the undeniable sweetness. The practice feels like less of a liability the busier a track gets. Vampy lyrics suit the 303 bass jam “Transport Me” — “I show you the life through my lens / I show you a twin turbo Bеnz / I show you what Birkins look like for your friends” — and “Twice,” in which Yachty races through a gauntlet of echoing voice snippets, relishing the freedom to follow his own instincts. The album succeeds in communicating a sense that you could drop Lil Boat into any situation and he’d float. It gives Blake an excuse to advance both the soporific sounds he explores with the generative sleep-music app Endel and the pop-oriented writing that nets him work with industry big fish.
This all makes Bad Cameo an uneven listen, the improbable product of intersecting habits and skill sets but complementary flairs for teasing profundity out of an almost exhausting, soul-searching earnestness. The balances and imbalances on display are by turns astounding and annoying; these two are positively bursting with ideas, occasionally to a fault, but more often to some exhilarating revelation. The hip-hop and club-music blend “Woo” is even tighter and catchier than the best of Blake’s last album, Playing Robots to Heaven, a treat for fans who had grown weary of the drippy adult-contemporary love songs he seemed to be settling into in this decade. Closer “Red Carpet,” a barbershop-quartet performance, best exemplifies the logic-defying synergy Bad Cameo taps into. One guy emotes about how Jameela Jamil is more important to him than the trappings of fame, while the other vents about catching hell growing up in the public eye. Do Blake and Yachty come out of this odd-couple experience loosening up in their respective solo catalogues? Or is Bad Cameo another frothy one-shot from colorful characters whose disparate goals won’t align so neatly again, a rap What if …, an ambient-pop Marvel Team-Up? Their restlessness suggests the latter.
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