The Singles Jukebox

Something tells me Yo isn’t trawling social media for cat pictures.

[Video][Website]
[4.29]

Micha Cavaseno: Recently, I’ve seen Spike Lee posing on a commercial for The View to promote Chi-Raq looking very peculiarly dressed, brandishing a cellphone saying “INSTAGRAM, CAN GET YOU KILLED” as sternly as possible, clearly attempting to awaken people to the threat of social media. Eyebrows arched, you have to drag it to the side and realize how bizarrely rap works in relation to technology. LL once turned the radio into a fixture of life, Paul Wall had the Internet Going Nuts via terrible frame-rates, and now Memphis legend Yo Gotti is paranoid on the net. Is “Down in the DM” a simple club banger with a hazy melody that seems to slip out the cracks of your fingers? Sure, that’s a lot of records, in fact the better version is Curren$y’s reversion “Top Down.” But what makes Gotti’s original more fascinating is the way he documents his internet life, talking about murder commissions, bold-faced abandon of net etiquette, the varieties of ways you get hooked. In simply stretching the ways that a guy like Yo Gotti has to keep himself plugged in at all times just to do ‘typical rapper shit,’ he’s stumbled onto some rare depth, intentional or not. If you’ll excuse me, I now have to see if we can have a remake of Johnny Mnemonic starring Yo Gotti, and hopefully we can get Johnny Cinco’s “Virtual Trappin” somewhere in the soundtrack.
[7]

David Sheffieck: Every generation gets the technology-centered pop songs it deserves, songs that are almost instantly dated by their reliance on ephemera. We have only ourselves to blame for laziness of this entry into the canon. Now get off my lawn.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: I guess I’m entirely out of sympathy for the imaginative space where mass-mediated technology facilitates fantastic scenarios into which the ordinary listener can insert themselves, thereby making the everyday world a little less humdrum. Partly this is a poorly-articulated and unevenly-distributed anti-fantasizing stance, which means that whole swathes of contemporary culture are unavailable to me, but the more I think about it the more I’m afraid it really is just sour grapes.
[4]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Despite the nice synth layer in the background, this is just lazy social media references an a subpar beat. And using the names of apps as verbs (“Snapchat me that pussy”) just, ugh. Worst of all, even the Rick Ross’ remix sounds completely uninspired.
[3]

Brad Shoup: There’s a faint aroma of the cuppa-kino about this, but I’m also the last person alive who loves Twitter so I can’t judge. He’s got solid advice, he owns his thirst, the synth is swiped as idly as a smartphone.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: The beat sounds a little anxious to me, Yo Gotti could be saying anything, even something less stupid than “I love the ‘gram, I’m addicted to it, I know I am” and it wouldn’t matter. He’s not anxious, he’s downright pathetic. I guess you could make a compelling song with this beat about the pointless shittiness of social media even when it leads to pictures of friends’ girlfriends’ vaginas, or meaningless interactions with them, but this isn’t it. A friend of mine recently advised me to avoid all screens before bed, someone should recommend it to Gotti before he goes into the studio.
[3]

Will Adams: I never liked “Kiss Me Thru the Phone”; “Down in the DM” is the bleak counterpart that makes me want to revise my opinion. Social media as tangled web of relationship speculation is a tradition I’ve had to endure since high school, and realizing it hasn’t gone away is a bit more than disheartening.
[3]