Kodak Black is 13 years younger and from 1,200 miles south, but on "Lock Jaw" sounds like he's been locked in a give-and-go for years. Quavo's staccato triplets on "Groupie Love" are blunted by the Auto-Tune. On Wave Gods, French has improved his writing, sure, but more importantly has imagined a world where that sound became the dominant commercial mode, where the precision of trap or the maximalism of drill never took over, where we're left with something more stripped down, woozier, wavier.Īnd so this time, the guests bend into his orbit. His golden age was the mid- and late-2000s, when Wayne and T-Pain dominated radio, and when Max was turning Harlem into a grim, funhouse mirror version of that sound. In reality, French was never a classicist in any sense, and certainly not a '90s revivalist. Worse still, his detractors-many of whom were presumably unfamiliar with his earlier work-wrote him off as a relic from a dead era, a last gasp for old New York heads who couldn't or wouldn't get with the times. His 2013 Bad Boy/Maybach Music Group debut, Excuse My French, had more guests (Drake, Nicki, Wayne, Snoop) than tracks, suffered dismal reviews, and failed to sell 100,000 copies. His introduction to pop audiences came on " Stay Schemin," which was more noted for Drake's shots at Common and Vanessa Bryant. Most fans push both Coke Wave installments into the Max B canon. Until now, French had spent much of his career as the weakest, or at least most anonymous rapper in the room. "Holy Moly" is all joy ("My bitch from Cuba and my lawyer Jewish") on the "Sanctuary" remix, he borrows the Weeknd's "Bring the drugs, baby, I'ma bring my pain." Sometimes, they're shoehorned into the same verse: on the Kanye West- and Nas-featuring "Figure It Out," French considers Chinx and Max, Eazy E, Allen Iverson, and Bill Cosby, but also slips in "Why I fucked them both when they said they're sisters?" and you can practically hear him grinning at the camera. Wave Gods hears French bring moments of tragedy and Technicolor excess to life frequently and in equal measure.
He's finally at the top-or at least adjacent to it-but he had to come alone. (The NYPD has said that they believe his murder might be tied to the 2007 killing of Stack Bundles, another collaborator.) It's in the shadow of that tragedy that French's new mixtape, Wave Gods, begins: "They threw me in the black hole, I had to climb up/ Once Chinx passed, I took some time off." On the tape's cover, French is joined by Max B, his kindred creative spirit who isn't up for parole until 2042. Last May, Chinx, a Far Rockaway native who was a close friend to and collaborator with French, was killed in a still-unsolved shooting.
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