The Singles Jukebox

Contrrroverrrsy…

[Video]
[5.83]

Julian Axelrod: Sexual attraction is intangible and unpredictable, and the same can be said of sexy drill, the cartoonishly horny offshoot of New York rap that’s currently approaching a new cultural apex. When I first heard Cash Cobain and Chow Lee’s 2 SLIZZY 2 SEXY, I was baffled and a little unnerved. A year later, I revisit it at least once a week. But while “Fisherrr” lacks the neon samples and class clown chemistry of Cash at his most unhinged, it’s subtle and refined enough to suggest this micro genre might have legs. Bay Swag’s no Chow Lee, but the way he volleys verses with Cash grounds the song in a classic New York hip hop framework, like the Beastie Boys if they never evolved beyond their penis balloon era. Ice Spice rises to the occasion with one of her most engaged performances in recent memory, trading diapers and delis for dinner dates and Danimals. (At the very least, she acquits herself better than other recent A-list attempts to jump on the sexy bandwagon.) The masterstroke (sorry) comes (sorry) almost two minutes in, when the insistent ticking of those signature drill hi-hats explodes into a flurry of drums that hit like a confetti cannon at the end of a Knicks game. It’s a sublime moment of musical edging that suggests Cash Cobain’s sound could go deeper (sorry) than anyone expected.
[8]

TA Inskeep: The low-key almost lo-fi-ness of this grabs me hard and won’t let go: it’s mostly just some synth chords and a click track backing up Cobain and Swag, both of whom have oddly appealing voices. (Normally I’m allergic to the Auto-Tune they’re using, but here it functions more like another instrument.) A bassline doesn’t even show up until almost two minutes in; it also helps that it appears while Ice Spice is dropping her sharp guest verse. This goes so soft it goes hard, y’know? If this is archetypal “sexy drill,” I may well be all in.
[9]

Alfred Soto: The year’s oddest track: a series of monologues, bits of which unintelligible, that end in a long u over a click track and basic keyboard chords. Drill baby drill!
[9]

Tim de Reuse: Under a distant, high string pad, an eerily peaceful chord progression chimes out. Ice’s flow is so relaxed he could melt. Bay Swag leads us to a gorgeous beat drop that threatens to escalate but quickly disappears. As I drift off I’m contemplating how to give head like you’re playing a flute. I have dreams that are very funny, but I don’t remember much about them.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Where exactly is the line that separates the minimalist from the incomplete? If a beat drops without having received any discernable build-up, can it really be said to have “dropped” at all? Is the traditional hook obsolete in a world where any slightly off-kilter remark about the fatness of an ass can become a marketable byword? Such are the questions raised by “Fisherrr,” and I have as much interest in answering them as Ice Spice has an interest in filling in the track’s fundamental blankness. “Giving Betty Boop” is a line in sore need of a better home.
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: Cash and Bay are lithe, nimble rappers, but they are not stars in the way Ice Spice is. Their ability to build compelling and catchy flows is good for making good songs that can fill a dance floor, but it’s not the kind that’s interesting to normal people who don’t give a fuck about music. Ice does possess that quality (though not in spades). Her tone is cool, relaxed and calm, one that can afford to be a bit less lithe and more clumsy, so it doesn’t fit over the light hi-hat pattern both Cash and Bay ride comfortably in a way that (quietly) AZ might like. But once the heavy kicks that swamp out the mix touch down, heavy handed and loud, Ice’s tone feels more comfortable in this terrain, glittering and gliding between the kicks and snares. Even the return of Cash and Bay feels, rightly so, like they’re playing on her terms — and it’s their song. They even leave with less of an impression, so I guess they couldn’t make a baddie fall in love with them. (They’ll have better luck with my homegirls, tho! They’re so quirky!)
[10]

Ian Mathers: Sometimes being laid back is a flex unto itself — which admittedly has kind of always been Ice Spice’s thing, but she’s doing it a little differently here, in a way that meshes with the other two rappers and the varying layers of percussion in the production. Plus we get a reminder to eat our oats and vegetables!
[6]

Aaron Bergstrom: As a song, it’s forgettable. As a debate about whether “your rice and your cabbage” or “my oats and my vegetables” is the better thicc-ness diet, it’s frustratingly inconclusive.
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: I feel like if a brand advertises itself as “Kids’ Yogurt,” you should probably compare your pussy to something else.
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Thrilling by virtue of being very, very boring. This trio (Ice Spice clearly stitched in later, but who cares?) rap like they’re narrating speedrunning tutorials or day-in-the-life TikToks; they don’t float over the beat but get subsumed by it, hitting hypnotic patterns and reflex-like tics in ways that compel even as they’re hard to explain. There’s barely even a hook, just that “for surrrrrre,” drawled out like that high-pitched synth sustained over the song’s length. They aren’t doing much — despite the ~sexy drill~ hype, “Fisherrr” isn’t, like, that horny. Instead, it captures the lazy joy of flirting out into the aether, of just saying shit out of pure love of saying it. I could probably listen to this for twenty four hours on loop.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Rap homeopathy: synth vapor and sex rhymes present in such trace amounts that any effect they might have is coincidental. I’d say Cash Cobain and Ice Spice have chemistry, but I fear that would be pseudoscience.
[4]

Will Adams: Woozy in the wrong way.
[4]