Continuing Amnesty Week with a song that is, at the very least, significantly better than the other ‘womp womp’-related news of 2018…
[Video]
[6.29]
Julian Axelrod: I saw Valee open for Young Thug in November 2017. (This was before he really blew up; for context, he went on before avant-garde rapper Leikeli47.) He ambled onstage with a book bag and shrugged his way through some standard-issue bangers. Then he reached into that book bag and pulled out a dog. Furrari looked alarmed, as a five-pound Yorkie surrounded by giant loudspeakers would be. But Valee just kept rapping, flexing his tiny dog like a brand new Patek. That’s Valee in a nutshell: the weird, gentle soul at the center of an icy trap wasteland. “Womp Womp” finds him at his most charismatic and confounding, reeling off warped one-liners over a beat that sounds like bubbling sewer water. It’s a testament to the rapper’s influence that Jeremih hews as close to Valee’s intonation as possible, the two voices melting into one sleek steel alloy. But Valee inhabits a world of his own: He does acid and chips a tooth. He tries Chinese food for the first time. He’s Snoopy in a room of droning adults, the world’s coolest mutt taking freakish flights of fancy to a place we couldn’t begin to understand.
[8]
Micha Cavaseno: “Womp Womp” is Valee at his most straightforward and commercial in 2018, especially when compared to the extremity of flows diving off a cliff on his Good Job You Found Me EP or other places. Tyler, The Creator and 6ix9ine have made a point to crip the run-on sentence phraseology and affectations, but only Jeremih has managed to get on a song with Valee to do it in complementary fashion. The strengths of “Womp Womp” are producer Cássio’s low-tech slink and Jeremih’s ponderous murmurs, providing a nice complement to Valee’s more dry rattle.
[8]
Iain Mew: The mirroring vocal and instrumental melodies are nursery rhyme bright, put through a tight monochrome filter. It could be a striking effect to build on, but they get the minimum out of it, just content to roll out a series of average one-liners.
[5]
Juana Giaimo: I doubted if I should mention the misogynist lyrics because it seems I do it almost every time I write about a rap song by a male artist, but it is 2018 and I’m fed up. I find disgusting every time Valee and Jeremih say they “beat pussy,” a rather violent line for my taste. In “Womp Womp” women are just objects they can fuck and buy things for, as a way of buying them and control their sexual life (“I spent seven hunnid’, fucked that overseas stunner/ If she a slut, I’ll find out, I’ll meet that bitch mañana”). They continue to degrade women by calling them “lazy” when having sex or saying they are dry as a cactus — cacti are full of water inside. Many said the lyrics of this song are nonsense, but they are not innocent: behind the nonsense, I can hear the misogyny and I don’t want to accept it, as it if it was naturally part of rap music, because I believe it can be much more than this.
[3]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: “Womp Womp” runs out of steam halfway through Valee’s verse, so I’m always left wishing for a condensed version of the song whenever I hear it. Even then, it’s impossible to deny Valee and Jeremih’s flow and how playfully it interacts with producer Cássio’s rumbling low-end and rubbery synths. I like it more when it’s lingering in my mind than blasting through my speakers.
[6]
Ryo Miyauchi: “Womp Womp” is definitely a step up for Valee, proving his slippery monotone flow is not just a hot style but also a pop-viable form. The record also benefits the featured Jeremih, who has been running with a percussive, neatly punctuated cadence of a similar vein since Late Nights. After laying down the onomatopoeic hook, he runs with that syllable-stretching flow so smoothly as he effortlessly slants and bends his end rhymes to fit the rhythm.
[7]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: “Womp Womp” moves through you with speed and precision– it’s new-wave boast rap (formalist-leaning compared to the 2018 curve) stripped down to its parts, with each bass note by producer Cássio feeling like a load-bearing beam. As for the two vocalists, the formulaic approach that said beat affords works to their benefit. Jeremih plays it straight, lounging around in the schoolyard taunt pose, while Valee gets to blow up his own sing-song formula, filling his verses with tricky turns of phrase that leave him the better of the pair. The only thing that “Womp Womp” needs to improve is to switch the ratio of the two– it’s 60:40 J:V now, but an arrangement that gives more space for the new guy would liven up the place.
[7]