Q spends the album taking pictures out sparks at the aspects of the rails with out ever letting the teach tip over. Centerpiece “oHio” has its personal three-act construction that flirts with the epic scale of prog. A grainy funk beat wafts in for the primary 3rd, as Q hints at near-death stories ahead of chopping to flexes about his AmEx and getting head in Paris. Simply as temporarily, he’s slinging jokes (“Nigga, your complain were given a unfavourable ass!”) on a fast paced synth beat that skirts into lounge-jazz territory the place he and Freddie Gibbs business barbs concerning the pitfalls of status and marriage over a piano and saxophone waltz. All of this occurs within the span of 5 mins. The frenzy of kinds, tones, and subject matters would crush a lesser artist and render the entire tune a damaged, soupy mess. However Q holds court docket, grinning his approach during the peaks and valleys.
The sheer quantity of modes Q is in a position to switching between stays astounding. However Blue Lips by no means feels gaudy or overly desirous about magnificence. None of it sounds made for the golfing route or for soirées on the seashore space. Those are competitive, revealing, and from time to time messy songs concerning the intersection of luck and the underlying harm from a sordid previous it’s continuously used to hide. For each kick-in-the-door anthem just like the cop-blasting “Pig Toes,” or the giddy look-at-me-now-ness of “Foux,” Q will spend a observe like “Germany ‘86”—named for the place and when he was once born—reminiscing on his father forsaking his circle of relatives and the road lifestyles he inherited in consequence.
Ever the blunt lyricist, Q’s writing has transform extra curt around the board, making each flex about jewellery land with as a lot affect as probes into his self-confidence. A tune like “Blueslides” is a microcosm of Q’s writing at its maximum economical, bending mild wordplay about despair and desperation round wilting piano and trumpets. Its 2d verse options a number of bars chastizing listeners for turning their backs on Kanye West, crudely chalking up his final half-decade of controversy to a rising indifference towards psychological well being advocacy. Despite the fact that it’s an oversimplification of many sophisticated problems (and a lot of lack of knowledge and bigotry), the harm in the back of the admission is actual. In context, the bars spotlight probably the most album’s, and Q’s, biggest considerations: the struggles of getting the whole lot on the earth and nonetheless no longer with the ability to outrun your issues.
Close to the start of “Film,” there’s a short lived vocal pattern taken from Ralph Bakshi’s 1975 cult vintage Coonskin, and that movie’s imperfect candy-colored bacchanalia may well be the nearest analogue for Blue Lips’s emblem of chaos. Bakshi’s function was once to carry the rigors, pleasures, and racism of Seventies inside towns to lifestyles in lurid element. Whilst Q’s ambitions aren’t that lofty, the album’s frenetic pacing and writing have compatibility the mildew all of the identical. An international’s value of remorseful about and a laugh is squeezed into just below an hour, and apart from a couple of hiccups—Devin Malik’s opening verse at the in a different way exhilarating “Again n Love” is a specifically harsh velocity bump—infrequently a 2d is wasted. It doesn’t simply push Q previous the crossroads he was once at pre-pandemic, it reaffirms him as one among mainstream rap’s most attractive and bold stylists. Few MCs, on his label or in other places, are in a position to firing in such a lot of other instructions and hitting this many objectives without delay with out sounding out in their intensity, however Q corrals the ups and downs of his lavish way of life right into a deliriously entertaining joyride.
