rae sremmurd - sremmlife (6 jan 2015)

1. “Lit Like Bic”
2. “Unlock the Swag” f/ Jace of Two-9
3. “No Flex Zone”
4. “My X”
5. “This Could Be Us”
6. “Come Get Her”
7. “Up Like Trump”
8. “Throw Sum Mo” f/ Nicki Minaj and Young Thug
9. “Yno” f/ Big Sean
10. “No Type”
11. “Safe Sex Pay Checks”

hmm "throw sum mo" isn't quite the world-stopping masterpiece i expected of these three acts tho

legit didn't know two-9 was a collective

i was expecting better from "throw sum mo" but still kinda anticipating this

it's a perfectly acceptable album cut. So far everything these guys have released has grown on me like crazy so I wouldn't put it past any of these tracks to do the same.

Thanks for starting this thread Lex!

i love the beat on it, time will tell on the song itself

this was still supposed to be an EP like a few weeks ago, pretty cool that the success of the singles got it bumped up to a full-length album

Throw Sum is excellent imo. Up there with the other two.

it's alright but i really wanted everyone involved to just wild out as we know they can, not anything this understated

I was definitely ready for an understated Nicki at this point in time. I also like the concept of an understated strip club jam.

well "pour it up" is over a year old now

And from than on only overstated strip club jams are allowed? I like the way the boys' overexcitement in the verses is punctured every time by Nicki's disinterested voice + the giggly "nothing really matters anyway" quality of the beat.

*then

aren't 90% of strip club jams all sad submarine synths feel-my-pain emo nonsense anyway these days?

my disappointment was more that if you've got rae sremmurd AND nicki AND young thug on the same track you should be playing to their collective wilding-out strengths

But this isn't a sad submarine synth feel my pain emo joint. It's a celebration of the absurdity of it all. And it's great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLa9YxV1Xps

another good one

feel like this group needs to change their name. like, pronto

Shut up dranreb ywons

I mean don't get me wrong, I'm all for underground musical acts having stupid names, but when you start to get mainstream exposure & radio airplay & shit you have to stop and think "actually, how are people not on the internet supposed to talk about this music"

i heard a radio DJ or two struggle with their name when they first started getting airplay a few months ago, now they all have pretty much gotten the hang of it. it's really not that hard to pronounce or spell.

It's fun to say imo

"throw sum mo" is ok ... the beat feels a bit too soon after "only" to me

also i'm not sure who decided nicki should be on a hook w/ no verse and young thug should rap a verse w/ no hook but i don't think it worked out -- nick sounds extremely bored

for the perplexed: http://www.thefader.com/2014/12/10/r-a-e-s-r-e-m-m-u-r-d

Every time I've heard a radio dj say their name (which is twice) they have made a point of explaining that it is ear drummers backward

Which it isn't, it's drummers ear backward

^^^ my thoughts exactly lol

Ya'll are a bunch of sselyoj stnadep

o ya D

i saw a stripper dance to "silent lucidity" by queensryche once

dayo otm

Nicki is supposed to sound bored! That's the conceit!

Every time I've heard a radio dj say their name (which is twice) they have made a point of explaining that it is ear drummers backward

― tl;dr, gukbar, morbis detrius (wins), Thursday, December 18, 2014 1:51 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I love how media pretends like everyone is dumb as fucking shit and didn't realize this within like the first four seconds of seeing their name

that's discriminatory whiney

i didn't realise it until 'dranreb ywons'

fully thought this was a female name. like a scandinavian one or something

*emoticon where the person is waving their arms like idk yo*

left yall the open zing goal obv

i didn't realize it until now

i always thought it was "drummers ear,"like swimmers ear or something

I esteem the word sremmurd, it is truly beautiful, but I prefer it without the 'sh' sound which also turns the drummers ear thing into sean connery

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/F81021FC-9344-4E63-8082-E7D3CDF00A58_zpsddfkcxo4.jpg

https://www.thefader.com/2014/12/29/stream-rae-sremmurd-debut-album

idk i like some of these beats but some better choruses plz

like unlock the swag is toxic no thanks

^ ronglife

would have been 100% perfect but for the safe sex psa finale (maybe the big sean one too)

so excellent tho. 'this could be us'!

i couldn't find this stream on uk itunes?

i don't even hate the safe sex finale, it's quite sweet

really good album! the beats are so excellent. not disappointed at all

thumbs up to my itunes for segueing into "one touch" as a bonus track

who here has the best Rae Sremmurd name? I'm pretty happy with La Yelpihs but Divad Ekard is fire.

Diva D!

Xela Nosrehpcam starts off well but descends badly

happy bday La Yelpihs btw

La Yelpihs sounds like a supergroup of female indie vocalists

Mine just sounds Hawai'ian

Vote in the poll btw guys NO (choose one): FLEX ZONE | TYPE

noslen darb motherfuckers

sounds like some kind of post dilla / flying lotus affair

My expectations were highest for Swaecation, because I wanted it to be a real Swae Lee solo debut and not just the bonus disc it essentially is. I don't think it cashes in on his talent or his buzz the way it could have, but once I balance for all of that I can at least appreciate that it mostly does what it sets out to do.

SR3MM though is just really unfocused and uneven and almost perfunctory at times. It feels like the disc the group shorted as they divided their attention across projects

I feel like Black Beatles was the sound of them arriving and this is the sound of them discovering that they now have to figure out where to go next. There's just less passion to it all. Like they're trying new stuff because they guess they have to and not out of genuine curiosity. There's a great yacht rock album somewhere inside Swaecation but it hasn't really left the shore. (Thugger does, obvs.)

Well I was expecting this album to be a bit patchy and disappointing compared to the last two. Especially after mixed feelings on Migos's bumper album and the fact I've already heard about a fifth of the album already.

I was wrong. It's a thrill-ride and great fun to listen to on shuffle. I've not really had time to check the whole thing out yet but there are already some proper pump your fist moments.

per hits magazine, failed to outperform the leon bridges album released the same week, even w/ streaming numbers added

they’ve never sold albums

That’s true. It strikes me as weird though. The singles aren’t exactly moving like hot cakes either this time around. Why aren’t the kids gravitating towards them? My initial lukewarmness had more to do with sky high expectations than with the actual quality of this album.

i thought they might buck that tendency post-"black beatles" and "unforgettable" but that is true enough

"powerglide" has actually been holding pretty strong, i think its peak position has been deflated by the crazy distortion of the streaming economy rn--drake to an extent, but mostly by cardi's album and especially post malone's album placing every song on the hot 100. if you look at spotify's weekly chart this week it's the 8th most streamed song on spotify not by drake, cardi or post malone... it's just that that means it's only the 26th most streamed song overall. (i think this is true for a lot of songs... "plug walk", "sad" etc.) "guatemala" and "close" were both on the hot 100 too prior to this deluge, i think things might even out in that regard as we get some distance from the carti/post malone albums

i like "guatemala" a lot

me too!

"powerglide" has more room to grow for sure but for now its hot 100 peak seems about right for how much exposure it seems to be getting, more "throw some mo" or "this could be us" than "no type". it is still a streaming-dominated hit and artists that are comfortably/consistently in the spotify top 50 are not really the ones being short-changed in the streaming economy lol. like yeah, big 'event albums' do shake things up a little but it's not tremendously different from when taylor swift would release an album and have every single track clogging up the top 20 on itunes for a week back when itunes was the thing -- basically a blip in the long run.

Whenever "Powerglide" comes on the radio it tends to outclass whatever comes on before or after, but I don't hear it on pop radio. It hasn't crossed over like 'Black Beatles,' so they're back to where we were exactly two years ago.

well, itunes did distort the charts but not in totality the way streaming is doing right now. itunes sales would shoot a song or two into the top 10 but not have 40% of the hot 100 eaten up by ~4 artists. it shortchanges pretty much every artist except those ones.

i don't really consider it a blip on the radar either. it screws with history! especially with distance and as memories get foggier. who is going to be around to tell kids that despite "going #1" nobody actually cared about eminem's "crack a bottle"

anyway i think ppl itt are forgetting that the sremm's chart success has always been very fleeting. album 2 was a mess singleswise until black beatles exploded out of nowhere and they had nothing to follow it up. perplexing pegasus was another flop (tho sounds amazing on the album). i think the comfortably midrange peak of powerglide and probably close and maybe guatemala once things clear out a bit reflects that black beatles cemented their status as a second tier rap act, which is actually nice since again things were looking really shaky in between the first album and black beatles. they might have another song (not from this album) float into the top 10 but they're just... pretty popular? not superstars? this has always been the case. the first album had like 4 radio hits and sold zip.

Swang was actually a pretty good follow up! But absolutely nobody was tipping it as a single when the album dropped. CLOSE, with its Travis Scott opening verse, looks like a hit on paper but it only just dipped in at 98 in the charts before disappearing again. It might reemerge at some point, but still...

wasn't it an extra/exclusive track? Insofar as those things matter anymore.

It was on the «deluxe», which dropped w the album proper. Those bonus tracks were all good iirc.

oh yeah i forgot about swang. i don't like that song at all

😕

lol "crack a bottle". idk, i'd say the main historical distortion comes from the general lack of willingness to let go of peak chart position as the proxy for how 'big' a song or album was and therefore To What Extent It Reflected And/Or Defined The Zeitgeist.

like, if you look at how "crack a bottle" did on the charts week-by-week, you can see the history pretty accurately: it sold a ton for one week (its first) then receded to obscurity quite quickly. same for, like, taylor hicks's "do i make you proud" and so forth. the charts were not really inaccurate to have these songs near or at the top of the charts on the weeks that they peaked, but the general fixation on peaks does lead us to inaccurate conclusions in such cases.

there was a time when chart runs pretty much all had the same 'shape' -- debut at a low-to-moderate position, rise a fairly steady number of positions each week until a plateau is reached, then tumble down rather quickly -- so peak position pretty much could tell you all you needed to know about how well a single performed. that period ended in the 90s, post-soundscan, but our favored ways of representing How The Culture Evolved has not really progressed past the joel whitburn book approach (debut date/peak position/weeks on chart). (the most commonly viewed repositories of distilled chart info, wikipedia articles, have narrowed the focus almost entirely on peak position.)

anyway! i need to spend some time with this album.

The new Swae Lee is full-on afropop, produced and co-written by Tekno:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBioIsLoXoE
Swae Lee ft. Drake • Won’t Be Late

black beatles holds up i think

i miss being excited about Rae sremmurd. The combo of absurdity, suaveness, and unhinged energy was really something when it all lined up.

Loved This weird one off trippie redd Collab

https://youtu.be/ZIPCLWqcYo0

The album hold up.

album yes, black beatles still sounds bad to me.

the "no type" beat is still one of my favorites, that decaying keyboard sound at the beginning that gets swallowed up by the bass

back together again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwra2z-OwB8
Rae Sremmurd • Denial

not loving this tbh

i feel like these guys were ahead of their time but when the moment for their kind of music came it passed them by instead of them grabbing it with both hands

yeah kinda boring

it's a nope from me

Swae Lee seemed like such a ready-made star, but, for whatever reason, apart from a few successful features (and yes, “Unforgettable” with French Montana and “Sunflower” with Post Malone were real blockbusters) he never took off as a solo artist. his promised album has yet to materialize.

this feels like a retreat, and it’s a bit sad to watch, especially since the song isn’t anything special.

I was really hoping for Swae Lee to succeed, all the more so because he was one of the first US artists to try and ride the incoming afropop wave: “Unforgettable” again - which was originally recorded with post-“One Dance” Wizkid - and “Guatemala” in its wake - and “Won’t Be Late”, which had Tekno involvement).

There was also this great afro-adjacent UK remix of “Unforgettable” by producer Jae5 with J Hus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxmZNqqLRV0

i think this song is cute. kind of forgettable and low key for a comeback single, but also the moment (in general) has probably passed them by so i'm not sure our expectations will ever be met... hard to turn back the clock a half-decade plus and still feel fresh and current. but i'm happy they're back

As somebody who tends to enjoy them far more than I should, this is sort of nice. Real low-key... not gonna win anybody over... but not a mess or anything.

It seemed like they had everything lined up for a minute there prior to SR3MM bricking (relatively speaking). But then the choice of singles leading into that project were perplexing and a bit meh (i like pegasus and t'd up just fine, but did somebody think these were hits?)... the album itself was ok but felt a bit loose compared to their best work (or to the then current-ish Ransom 2). This was even before you add in the attached Slim Jxmmi record nobody has listened to since 2018 and the Swae Lee record which felt mostly like him rambling over chill grooves. Powerglide ruled though!

“Powerglide” was awesome, yeah, but I am not sure if I was more into Sremm or Mike WiLL on the first two albums. “Throw Sum Mo” and “By Chance” probably my faves.

Same. "By Chance" is great.

Feel like they both hit a wall (commercially at least) by 2018 or so. Like, they lost some sort of energy or something.
Still some decent tracks, but nothing undeniable after that.

i'm not sure rae sremmurd/mike will lost anything so much as rap started to move away from melody/pop songwriting and towards harder, lyrical, street style rap. out of sheer popularity rap music charts as pop music right now but artists like lil durk, lil baby, gunna, moneybagg yo, polo g make music that is pretty far from i.e. "no type," "black beatles" etc. you can see it too in the way that music by ppl like drake & future have evolved over the same time period.

Yeah. There was certainly a sea change post-Lil Baby/Gunna that knocked a lot of the class of '15/'16 down a few rungs.
I guess I hoped they (Sremm and Mike Will) would find a way to adapt and pivot better than they have (and like MW had done before that).
I like ridiculous just as much (more than?) the next guy, but, interpolating Elvis with Diplo probably ain't the way back to the top for Swae Lee... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6mEXWXeolk

The new album sounds fresh.

I just played “YMCA” (yes, because of its title, what of it?) and I liked it

that flaunt it - sexy - ymca run is good

I like them in general, so YMMV, but there's a lot to enjoy on the new record.
Much better than I thought it would be at this point. Thumbs up.

The main problem with Sr3mm was how unfocused it seemed: a few v high highs but a whole lot of filler. This one sounds tight and plays to their strengths.

47 minutes long? I'm here.

listening now, mostly pretty good (i had to skip "lean so cold," sheesh), especially like when they use older school sounds, like the miami bass touches that pop up in "tanisha" and "sexy" and the amen break-driven electro at the beginning of "flaunt it."

i am less interested in their straight trap stuff, they don't have the same energy and the hooks aren't so sticky. "royal flush" is good tho

ooh yeah also "mississippi slide"

Yeah. Lean So Cold is a brutal clunker coming that early in the record.

i need a model right next to me, i'm talkin lisa leslie

pretty funny to me that rae sremmurd and they. dropped an album on the same day

I'm obsessed with "Flaunt It."