Pitchfork author Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, bizarre tweets, vogue traits—and the rest that catches his consideration.
By the point you’re accomplished studying this, Virginia rapper-producer GAWD will in all probability have one other music out
Maintaining with GAWD’s musical output is a full-time gig. Over the previous decade, he’s logged greater than 1,500 SoundCloud uploads—largely self-produced rap tracks, together with beats on the market and DJ mixes—throughout practically 50 totally different aliases together with TRICK RACER, MR I GOT GASS N I CNT PASS, and, merely, YEAH. There’s in all probability much more materials I’m lacking. There have been GAWD songs that I heard as soon as and was by no means capable of finding once more, leaving me to marvel in the event that they had been hallucinations. Looking for one thing particular in his scattered catalog can really feel as pointless as looking for a girl within the crowd of a Conway the Machine present.
The songs themselves don’t do this a lot to alleviate that feeling of being misplaced on the darkish facet of Mars. Throughout numerous blurry idea albums (together with ones about religious awakenings and political conspiracies) and freewheeling mixtapes, he gives a disorienting marathon of pitch-altered, inner-monologue-style rapping, blown-out and synth-heavy psychedelic beats, and a barrage of DJ tags. The enigmatic 24-year-old’s music comes off as random and improvised however, within the grand custom of mind-meltingly prolific rappers like Lil B, there may be intentionality to the chaos.
Talking from his house in Richmond, Virginia, GAWD talks about hip-hop with the fervour and curiosity of a day by day rap discussion board poster. “50 Cent was the primary rapper I perceived,” he says. “Bruh was deadass a New York rapper with West Coast G-funk melodies.” (One in every of his most-used aliases is 65 Cent.) He goes on to clarify the curatorial significance of once-mighty mixtape DJs like Evil Empire and DJ Drama, whose abilities have grow to be much less appreciated within the streaming period. “DJs are those who may signify a complete area or model,” he stresses, earlier than citing DJ Victoriouz and DJ Moondawg’s unforgettable work with Chief Keef. “I understand how I felt when Again From the Useless dropped.”
GAWD hasn’t had a correct breakout second fairly but, however there was 2019’s “EVERYWHEREIGO,” which he produced for Richmond native BabyxSosa and now has over 4 million performs on YouTube. You’ll be able to often depend on him to place out an entire challenge each few weeks, so when 4 entire months handed between June’s 30-song religious odyssey 65 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT and this week’s 10/17 (which, in fact, actually appeared out of skinny air as I used to be penning this) the break felt so long as the one Dr. Dre took between 2001 and Compton.
