The world isn’t ready for “Something About Shirley”
16.02.2024 - 17:03
/ thefader.com
There’s something in the water in New Jersey — a close-to-deadly concentration of wormwood, perhaps, or of fresh blood drained from an inexhaustible supply of sacrificial virgins. Whatever it is, Fatboi Sharif and Roper Williams are drinking from the tap.
Sharif and Williams first established their elite chemistry as a rapper-producer duo with 2020’s Gandhi Loves Children, further showing off their symbiotic bona fides on its 2021 deluxe edition. An anachronistic endeavor in terms of Sharif’s byzantine rhyme schemes and Williams’s stark, menacing beats, the project had historical precedent; much of its tracklist would sound at home on a mid-’90s Wu-Tang solo record.
Even on 2023’s Planet Unfaithful, whose three drumless cuts are light years away from most contemporary hip-hop, Sharif and Williams stuck to a conventional format: six discrete tracks that, taken together, unmistakably comprise a rap tape. On their new collaboration, they enter uncharted waters.
Billed as an album but dressed as a single on the DSPs, “Something About Shirley” isn’t either, exactly. It fits more comfortably in the classical tradition of the “art song,” a story-poem set to music, but that designation doesn’t account for the uneasy interplay between the vocal and the productional that plays out across the piece’s precisely 10-minute run time.
What’s happening here is more akin to Scott Walker’s late albums than the early work of Schubert. Read Next: New Music Friday: Stream new projects from Babyface Ray, NewJeans, Blur, and more
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