Winner of seven AFI awards…
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[4.33]
Anthony Easton: Sometimes the American obsession with work over everything else leads to some very stupid choices, like voting for Reagan, or recording songs like this.
[2]
Alfred Soto: Triumphalist nonsense pitched at a Katy Perry dog whistle. I graded on a curve because of the title.
[2]
Brad Shoup: You gotta start making some capital expenditures. Like a backup charger. Or an extra shirt in the glovebox. Or rhymes that outlast the couplet form. He’s all exhale, no intake; all process, no product. And he’s backed by the rap equivalent of lens flares.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: I love the ponging and dull thuds of the beat but those frostly tinkles don’t code hustle, unless hustle includes raiding the old hard drives of the early part of the millennium for disused productions.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: “Four in the morning; I ain’t seen my bed”: sure. “Goin’ so hard that my phone went dead”: wait, when did the hustle turn into the night out on the town? (Next morning, Lantana deletes a half-dozen embarrassing selfies from his Instagram.) The synth pings remind that Cincinatti might be a Southern town stranded on the wrong side of the Ohio, while the gritty tones suggest Lantana is a man who hasn’t yet figured his hustle isn’t about to pay off any time soon. There’s none of the dread of, say, Ace Hood struggling to stay above water, but his workaday determination delivers in a paycheck-to-paycheck kinda way.
[6]
Josh Langhoff: Fresh from hosting “We Built It” night at last year’s Republican Convention, Lantana the workaholic skips changing his clothes, charging his phone, eating, any nicety not essential to getting paid. For the past couple Saturday nights this song soundtracked my drive home from the city after playing jazz piano; sandwiched between “Act Right” and “Type of Way” on Power 92, wad of cash in my pocket, “All Hustle” was unbeatable. Distinct from biweekly paychecks, the wad of cash carries an immediate satisfaction, at once precarious, exhilarated, and spent (the Germans have a word). I should point out, though, that Lantana gets his title ratio wrong. Cash is magical because it symbolizes all kinds of stuff: hustle yes, but also pride in your craft, the friends and gladhands who got you the job, possibilities for the future, and some luck, let’s say luck’s the catalyst. That cash is choppers and diamonds, it’s your calendar filling up and your mail not filling you with dread, it’s fuel and a car and the road itself — I mean, you can see why the head honcho symbol of Sunday mornings gets jealous.
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