When an artist has made 13 albums and nearly two dozen mixtapes in 15 years, does that person have anything new left to say? It’s a question that hangs over Nayvadius “Future” Cash’s latest album, The Real Me.
Most of Future’s peers in the post-Lil Wayne digital-trap era of the early 2010s, from fellow Atlanta stars Young Thug and 2 Chainz to Southern boldfaced names like Kodak Black and Kevin Gates, have faded back into the regional-rap morass. Meanwhile, Future continues to successfully mine his formula on the Billboard charts. It was his 2024 collaboration with Metro Boomin and Kendrick Lamar, the Number One hit “Like That,” that ignited Lamar’s historic battle with the king of streaming, Canadian superstar Drake. This year, Future and Drake — whose history together ranges from the self-satisfied 2015 mixtape What a Time to Be Alive to “Wait for U,” a moodily evocative 2022 chart-topper with Nigerian singer Tems — settled their differences on “Ran to Atlanta,” a cut from Drake’s blockbuster Iceman that peaked at Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100.
Yet Future can’t avoid being symptomatic of a mainstream rap industry that feels artistically exhausted, too uninspired to imagine new vistas beyond the old “bitches”/drugs/wealth dichotomy, and desperate for crossover gimmicks to spark waning audience interest. The 42-year-old doesn’t earn the kind of “Peter Pan syndrome” accusations that torment the 39-year-old Drake. He doesn’t publicize his personal travails on social media, and has created distance between himself and a famed character that seems perpetually stuck in youthful debauchery. Thankfully, he doesn’t use The Real Me to force a country-pop duet onto us. (However, he deploys a sample of Glen Campbell’s “The Bottom Line” for one of the album’s best tracks, “Weight Up.”) But there are other tropes that will ring familiar, like the weepy guitar strings that saddle “California Girls” as Future harmonizes “So many bitches all around the world” in a delighted voice, and his utter disregard for political correctness when he claims “all these ho’s gay” on “Off the Hinge,” as if every woman needs a good dicking down, regardless of her sexual orientation. They don’t call him the “toxic king” for nothing.
No one’s expecting the ATL astronaut to recapture a 2014-15 imperial peak marked by classics like DS2, Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights. But he has recently constructed event albums, including 2022’s I Never Liked You and 2024’s Metro Boomin collaborations We Don’t Trust You and We Still Don’t Trust You, that recenter his idiosyncratic mix of melodic trills and sotto voce rumbles in engagingly fresh concepts.
Those instincts largely fail him on The Real Me. A key moment arrives in “No Misery,” the third track on the 58-minute album, when we hear the voice of Andre 3000 (via an excerpt from Marcus A. Clarke’s 2019 documentary on Future, The Wizrd). “Future has a certain pain behind what he’s doing,” Andre 3000 explained. He added that the source of Future’s magic is from how the rapper allows us to “watch me balance the pain.” The brief presence of an all-time great like Andre 3000, even in sampled form, should’ve been a sign that Future will explore something more profound than plug talk and exotic ho’s. But he doesn’t.
For folks simply eager to hear Future do his thing, the first half of The Real Me offers some sparks. “Tank Top Pluto” has harsh, ringing tones reminiscent of “I Serve the Base,” as he crows that he’s “colder than ice.” “Build a Bitch,” co-produced by Dre Moon and Allen Ritter, is a beatless and strangely alluring ballad as he tells us, “That throat she got, that girl deserve a Grammy/Swallowing me like she eating a Plan B.”
Future can still flip lines with colorful metaphors, from claiming he’s “Got cocaine in the wall, my plug pick up my call” on “Weight Up,” to comparing himself to Harlem fashion icon Dapper Don on “Konnichiwa.” But on “2018,” he tries a vocal flow marked by a high, whiny voice as he harmonizes, “Nasty bitch tried to suck me while I was peein’/I let her eat it up ‘cause I was on the Hen’.” It doesn’t work and portends a string of desultory cuts like “Money Over Everything,” “Off the Hinge,” “Hollywood,” and “Kick.” Then Pharrell Williams arrives for “Alice.” Last year, the famed hyphenate briefly descended from his perch as Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director to show he still had musical juice with his production on Clipse’s acclaimed Let God Sort ‘Em Out. But “Alice” is a tired mash of keyboard pop that leaves Future muttering about a woman whose “nose is white” and “losin’ her soul.” It’s a far cry from “Move That Dope.”
At one point, Future offers a glimpse of what we can only imagine is Nayvadius Cash’s real life. “Lil’ one tryna follow my steps, but he needs to finish school/Told my sons to be better than me, I told ’em the truth,” he says on “If I Could.” “I love my family, it’s hard to tell ‘em how I feel.” One could counter that Future should’ve spent this album trying to figure that out. However, that path could lead him away from the brand of expositions on erotic pleasures that sustain his fame and, more important, his fortune.
Future’s still a bluesman bent on evoking his days wilding in the streets as if he’s still living them. Maybe the problem with The Real Me is that he simply mixed the formula wrong, leading to a work slightly below standard. But the question of whether he can imagine himself as anything new looms larger and unresolved.
Cheery Viruet*
Cheery Viruet
