“Jumpman” by Drake and Future

I have to admit, of all the trends in modern Pop music, I never expected the fragmented, repetitive hook to be elevated into an actual legitimate artistic technique. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised, since Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” had already done basically the same thing as far back as 2008, but it took so many years for anyone to follow suit that I had just assumed it was never going to happen. Like most of Future’s work, this song features fairly empty, generic lyrics, but in this particular subgenre of Rap the lyrics are irrelevant anyway. The vocals just serve as a component of the song’s hypnotic rhythm, and the haunting atmosphere this creates puts this way ahead of any of the standard-issue Nu-Crunk/Vine Rap hits, confirming that Future (and his peers like Young Thug, Travis Scott and Post Malone) is in a completely different genre from acts like T-Wayne or O.T. Genasis. A few less-than-stellar featured credits notwithstanding, this was the first real Future song to really take off as a major hit, and while that may be partly because of Drake’s presence, Drake basically took on Future’s sound and style for the duration of the collaborative mixtape from which this song is derived. So this is still essentially Future’s song, and it seems as good a choice as any to launch him into the Top Forty.

Verdict: Good.

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