![]() ![]() For me, that’s where the Prodigy influence is strongest P, after all, is the rapper who taught a whole generation how to be weird and dark and personal and depressed without losing touch with their own fundamental hardness. The production, most of it from producers whose names I don’t recognize, is built on strange sounds and airy textures, its crackling film-score samples pretty and fragile as a candle’s flickering flame. There’s a lot of baroque fuck-you-up talk on the mixtape - “y’all niggas never seen blood float in orbit” - but it’s all intense and idiosyncratic in the way that the best rap music can be. But 16 Waves is a great place to jump in because it’s so weird and personal. Hus has been doing this for a few years now, racking up an intimidatingly huge discography in short order. He’s not chasing a mainstream that doesn’t exist anymore. The great thing about Hus Kingpin is that he’s perfecting his own distant, refracted New York sound, and he’s doing it without any commercial concessions at all. And for those of us who love Migos and Roc Marciano, the genre is an endless bounty of riches. Rappers are making music for audiences who like to hear the kind of rap music that they make. We still hear echoes of that in the talk of the rap generation gap - the elders like the Hot 97/Beats 1 host Ebro who famously go into harrumphing fits every time they come face to face with the Lil Uzi Verts of the world.īut most people, I think, have figured out that rap, like everything else, has splintered into a million tiny pieces, that there is no center anymore. There was a supremely unattractive grumpiness to the way many prominent New York voices, especially in the online-media world, looked at the way rap was going. I heard, over and over again, how we had to bring New York back, how we had to take rap back from the Southern insurrectionists who had become the commercial and creative center of the genre. When I moved to New York, in the middle of the last decade, boom-bap was dying, and New York rappers didn’t know how to handle it. And like those guys, Hus does fascinating things with the New York boom-bap of his ’90s youth. He’s on the same continuum, somewhere between the cerebral insularity of Ka and the dusty head-smack intensity of Westside Gunn and Conway. He comes from the same Long Island town, Hempstead, as Roc Marciano, and his music has the same hardnosed, evocative artiness. Hus Kingpin comes from a different world. ![]() ![]() Besides, people from the Prodigy/Nas generation were trying to be rap stars, pushing their music in ever-more-commercial directions until it eventually became obvious that they were losing their base and they needed to recalibrate. Hus’ voice isn’t a battered rasp it’s higher and flintier. And on a purely aesthetic level, Hus doesn’t sound that much like Prodigy. Prodigy’s influence isn’t lost on Hus he and frequent collaborator SmooVth named their 2016 album H.N.I.C.: Hempstead Niggas In Charge in honor of Prodigy’s 2000 solo LP H.N.I.C. Instead, Hus comes off sounding a whole lot more like Mobb Deep’s Prodigy. And his lyrics are an impressionistic kaleidoscope of violence, a collage of bloody shards of memory. Hus raps in a staggered, grizzled cadence, weaving just off the beat instead of studiously sticking to it. Instead, his approach, I think, comes from another Queensbridge rapper, a contemporary of Nas. But Hus doesn’t really sound anything like Nas. For rappers from that region and generation, Illmatic-era Nas is generally considered to be the Platonic ideal for rap music, the living embodiment of everything a rapper should be. Hus is, after all, a rapper from the greater New York area, and he’s somewhere in his thirties. There’s a moment on “Lootpack” - the Madlib-produced, 83-second opening track from Long Island rapper Hus Kingpin’s new mixtape 16 Waves - where Hus says, “I’m the nicest since Nas passed the torch over.” It’s not an especially surprising moment. ![]()
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