As of this writing, it has been over two days since Future and Metro Boomin dropped their first full-length collaboration, We Don’t Trust You, and it has almost been completely overshadowed by a Kendrick Lamar cameo. The track on which he appears, “Like That,” prominently features Rodney O and Joe Cooley’s 1987 single “Everlasting Bass,” and Metro uses it like Three 6 Mafia did throughout their discography, from “Where Da Bud At” to “Who the Crunkest.” Thanks in part to the Mafia, “Everlasting Bass” has become an avatar of Jheri-curled hardness, and an ominous allusion to the predations of the crack era. Metro summons the vibe while blending in Michel’le’s nursery line from Eazy-E’s “Eazy-Duz-It,” to boot. “Muthafuck the Big 3/It’s just big me!” charges Lamar, apparently calling out rivals Drake and J Cole as well as referencing Ice Cube’s Big 3 basketball circuit.
The ripple effects of Lamar’s “Like That” verse have galvanized rap fans, inspired too many social-media explainers on his references — the shoutout to E-40 and The Click, Melle Mel, and Prince (“Nigga, Prince outlived Mike Jack[son]”) — the 6 God’s beleaguered fan base to rally around him, and led Drake himself to make a defensive, albeit vague remark during a concert in Sunrise, Florida. Suddenly, it’s 2013 again, with Lamar kicking over the Round Table just as he once did on Big Sean’s “Control.” But in 2024, the stakes seem much lower. Both Lamar and Drake are in the mid-thirties, with their aesthetic contrasts firmly well established. A decade ago, the two seemed representative of different paths mainstream rap could take; now, they’re just maintaining empires. Any ensuing lyrical dispute, whether it’s more of the “sneak dissin’” the two have engaged in for years or a full-on rap battle, will feel more akin to Lebron vs. Curry in the play-in tournament, not the championship.
Thankfully, that can’t be said for Metro Boomin, who has embraced maximalist, cinematic gestures in an era when the genre feels too niche, too reducible to TikTok clips and 15-minute-long EPs. Unlike Heroes and Villains, his solid albeit portentous effort from 2022, We Don’t Trust You doesn’t come packed with Morgan Freeman as the voice of God. However, the St. Louis-born, Atlanta-based producer culls heavily from several snippets of a boisterously entertaining Prodigy interview where the late Queensbridge rapper called out his competition. “We the professionals, son! We professionals at what we do! Like, cut it out!” Prodigy roars in a clip inserted at the beginning of “Claustrophobic.”
All of Metro’s symphonic textures — the spooky tones of “Ice Attack,” his sampling of Mobb Deep’s “Quiet Storm” on “Seen It All” — offer opportunity for a compelling leading man to weave magic. On that level, Future is only intermittently successful. The Atlanta rapper’s mannered, free-associative delivery doesn’t naturally yield the kind of electric sparks that Lamar generates on “Like That.” And unlike Playboi Carti, whose strangely hoarse cameo on “Type Shit” will continue to fuel debate around his increasingly weird style, Future doesn’t attempt any major creative shifts on We Don’t Trust You. He remains a rapper-singer who burrows into tracks as he conveys his reality of sensual delights and opiate-numbed paranoia. Love it or hate it, he’s going to give you a lot of bars about drinking codeine and serving amphetamines. He may not rise to Toxic King levels here, but he’s still got “these regular hoes/I got superstar hoes/Taking pictures of me like a Fed” on “Young Metro.”
Future serves as the eye at the center of the storm as Metro orchestrates a whirlwind of old-school verisimilitude, guest appearances from the likes of Rick Ross and Travis Scott, and haughty, post-platinum angst reminiscent of Missy Elliot’s attack against her haters on Da Real World. The Atlanta rapper offers a notably strong chorus on “Running Out of Time,” and bounces energetically on “Fried (She a Vibe).” But his performances on tracks like “GTA” and “Ain’t No Love” sound dreary. We Don’t Trust You feels longer than its hour runtime, despite several decent cuts. The album isn’t bad: Metro remains a fascinating producer, and Future manages to hold his own despite his well-worn tics. But it only takes a single Lamar verse to show what the game’s been missing.
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.