Where the voices of Gud’s usual muses are ethereal and distant, sometimes verging on dissociative, Papi is immediate and unrestrained from the opening bars of “12 Stout Street.”’ His tone is somewhere between howling at the moon and crying out for help, a jagged blade sharpened by a lifetime of heartbreak: imagine “Dreams and Nightmares” filtered through Michigan rap, Lil B, and a thousand blunts. It’s not just the lack of accent or language barrier that makes this collaboration even more direct than Gud’s work with Sad Boys, but also Papi’s flow itself. There is humor to Papi’s bars: a track like “Still in Da Hood” drops pop culture references from cartoons to wrestling (“Drako sound like Boomhauer,” “Spike Dudley with the leg drop”) with no irony or quotation marks, just small comforts in a world marked by the ever-present expectations of looming death or heat around the corner. The Sad Boys affect was undoubtedly genuine-the lives of Lean and his collaborators have been marked by a number of tragedies since their explosion of success-but being an “emotional boy” is as much an aesthetic as it is a sincere expression, the Arizona-sipping, athleisure-wearing equivalent of goths from bygone eras. Unlike the projects of the galaxy-brained Rxk Nephew, whose treatises still function best as YouTube loosies more than full-length records, Foreign Exchange is tight and cohesive, benefiting from Gud’s experienced pop precision.
PAPI PAPI VIDEO SONG TORRENT
The collective Rx discography is a veritable torrent that not even Noah could tread. Though the delivery might differ, both scenes have pushed the envelope in terms of vulnerability in rap, one with a kind of sensitive poetry and the other with unsparing detail. Sad Boys and the loose Rx collective alike conjure very specific stylistic universes with devoted cult followings, each group re-interpreting familiar trap beats and lyrical tropes into new languages of rap, uncanny but also familiar. It’s a partnership that, at first glance, seems unexpected-the Swedish rap universe flirts with hyper-pop, and it’s hard to imagine Rx Papi ever working with Charli XCX-but it also makes a strange kind of sense. It’s especially noteworthy, then, that the aptly named Foreign Exchange came about not because of A&R or a phoned-in business negotiation, but because Gud was so taken with Rx Papi’s work that he reached out to the New York rapper directly about collaborating.
Despite the now substantial influence and imitation of his sound, Gud has been relatively selective in the artists he works with: a beat on Halsey’s debut album here, a co-production credit on Travis Scott and Quavo’s Huncho Jack there. The cooing vocal samples, angelic synths, and crystal shards of sound synonymous with Sad Boys and Drain Gang were and are frequently the product of producer Micke Berlander, better known as Gud. When baby-faced Swedish rappers like Yung Lean and Bladee first started racking up views in the United States, their viral success was owed as much to the beats as it was the bars.
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