The Singles Jukebox

It don’t matter who’s popping for the moment; P is forever…

[Video]
[5.75]

Nortey Dowuona: I gotta be real here: Gunna actually sounds a delight in real life and a decent guy. He cannot rap though. The beat is also too dusty and dull. Future sounds unengaged and too low in his range to really bring the song above acceptable. Thug stays in his lower range but lightens up and drops some fantastic bars. Oh well. Gunna better put out a pushing Qs next and get Mick Jenkins on it. Maybe drop an NFT of them in a pic.
[4]

Oliver Maier: I’m not going to judge anyone for not liking Gunna. He’s a little ridiculous. He raps about fucking genies and has album covers that look like this. There is the sense — not one I subscribe to, but it exists — that he has stumbled into hip-hop stardom somewhat by accident, an avatar for the kind of rap a lot of people hate without either the critical celebration now enjoyed by the likes of Playboi Carti and costar Young Thug or the relief of irrelevance now enjoyed( ?) by Lil Pump. I feel for him, not just because that’s a tough gig, but because I think he has good musical instincts including, yes, restraint. His muted style makes it hard to point out a particular song or verse as a showcase, but I will stand behind the position that it takes talent to do so much with so little the way he does on songs like “Speed It Up” and here on “Pushin P”. He, Thugger and Future rap so similarly that it sounds like one voice modulating between three pitches. Together they form a kind of half-conscious monologue, slurring through alliterative half-thoughts and phasing across either side of Wheezy’s beat, one second lucid, the next sluggish and hypnotised. Poetically pointless, pratically perfect.
[9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Potent punchlines, punctuated perfectly. 
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: I didn’t expect these guys to come through with a backpacker exercise in 2022 but, please, who doesn’t find pleasure in plosives? This has me feeling much the way I do whenever I hear Blackalicious’s “Alphabet Aerobics“: it’s very clever, but what is it for?
[5]

Al Varela: I’m always really bothered when a trap song has a solid idea for a hook but delivers it so poorly that it loses whatever magic it could’ve had. The melody in Gunna’s reflections on “pushin’ p” is catchy on its own, but he delivers it in such a sleepy, dull delivery that I can’t imagine even vibing to it at the club. Usually, that means the song is coasting on “vibes” rather than any sense of propulsion, but Wheezy’s beat on this song straight sucks. Colorless mush that will inevitably drown in the lifeless thud of the bass. It’s not like Future or Young Thug do anything to save it, though it did amuse me hearing Thug come into the song with a full-on incoherent babble. The only time the song made me smile, or emote, really. Bad.
[3]

Ian Mathers: The other two already sound comfortable in these environs, but somehow when Young Thug starts up the whole thing snaps into what passes for focus. A sly, slight shrug of a track, as if they’ve noticed (we’ve all noticed) how little apparent effort the rich have to put into things and so emulating that and getting away with it is its own status symbol. It kind of works, even.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: You know Atlanta is truly dead and buried when they had to steal slang from the Bay Area you haven’t seen in forever, to make a lazy rewrite of a song from more than a decade ago that Future already released and had as a street single. Which, somehow, is the biggest hit out of the entire QC/YSL/Future axis in close to a year? Perhaps even more. It’s bad enough that I miss the Atlanta of yesteryear where two of these men were actually setting trends and not desperately clinging on to their clones for life and vitality. And I say this as a former New Yorker who remembers the music coming out of that city in the late ’00s. This is a true nadir.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Picture the flow of Gunna and Future, harmonists as pleasing to the ear as the Everly Brothers, as a river current of moderate force, too caught up in itself to eddy; the obscured burble confident of sound and suspicious of words; giddy on stripping those slurs we can make out of signification. “Pushin P” was already doomed to join the red solo cup among catchphrases made momentary in the pop culture mind — several students have quoted it snice last week — but as a murmured boast it’s tops.
[9]