“Black Jeep” sounds like someone put “Heart-Shaped Box” in slo-mo and then threw a beat on top, and it totally works. There’s something genuinely affecting and tender about songs like “Pictures 2,” with simple, wistful guitar chords from up-and-coming local producer Fish Narc strumming over a shuffling trap beat while Mackned, Lil Peep, and Lil Tracy mourn lost loves, lost friends, and bad decisions. ![]() With plenty of guest appearances from Lil Peep and Lil Tracy, Hollywood Dropout finds Mackned far more confident and comfortable in the strange new musical world he helped create, continuing to push the boundaries of what it means to be a rapper in 2017. On Mackned’s latest LP, Hollywood Dropout, he finally returns to the stylistic world of Hurt Cobain, and this time he totally nails it. The latter two perfected the sound in the intermittent years, leaning heavily on emo to concoct their own particular musical fusion, but Mackned seemed to drop the sound after Hurt Cobain II to return to his gothic trap roots on 2016’s American Boy (with a brief funk detour on Born Rich). Lo and behold, a few years later, the sad guitar/trap sound is becoming one of the defining sounds of Generation Z, drawing millions of listens and streams on Soundcloud and YouTube and launching Mackned’s new crew with stars Lil Peep, Lil Tracy, and many others-Gothboiclique-to viral fame. Mackned and the Thraxxhouse crew always had a willingness to cross stylistic boundaries, bringing goth and witch house into trap music, and the resultant dark, crystalline tracks they were able to produce felt genuinely fresh and new. The AutoTuned crooning was clearly freestyled, and the experimental sonic mashup between genres didn’t feel much more than just that-an experiment. Beyond the amazing project title, the music seemed a little slapdash, in stark contrast to his incredibly polished FEMALE LP that had come out just months prior. To be fair, it didn’t seem as if Mackned totally got it yet either. ![]() Artists mixing trap with rock, brilliant songwriting with horrible musical stylings, krautrock with Americana: These artists’ strange smooshings resulted in sounds we didn’t know we wanted in the first place.īack when West Seattle’s Mackned started rapping over sad guitar tracks on his first Hurt Cobain EP, I didn’t get it. The cereal aisle still has the corn flakes you buy, but next to it, what’s this? Pumpkin corn flakes? September’s best local records were a little like that cereal aisle-full of flavors you know mixed in with some weird pumpkin flavors you’re not entirely ready for, but end up liking anyway. ![]() In September, summer and fall smoosh together in odd ways.
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