Lil Yachty recently pronounced himself “devastated” by the lukewarm critical and commercial reaction to his 2017 debut album Teenage Emotions. You could see why its sales figures came as a disappointment. His was a very modern rise to fame – instead of hustling demos or carving out a name in rap battles and open mic nights, he came to prominence appearing in fashion influencers’s Instagram posts, while his music attracted notice on the soundtrack to a viral comedy video. It’s the kind of success that might struggle to translate into something more tangible, like lasting record sales – but, still, if you’ve got 4.9 million Instagram followers, you might expect more than 44,000 of them to buy your album in its week of release.
Equally, you could see why Teenage Emotions failed to get fans into shops. You didn’t have to be the kind of rap aficionado horrified by the self-styled King of Teens’s punkish refusal to pay due reverence to his forebears (he claimed he knew fewer than five songs by Biggie Smalls and Tupac combined) to think that, over 70 minutes, the album spread his oft-questioned talents quite thin. More interest was aroused by its cover – featuring a gay couple kissing – than its contents, which his detractors would say is Lil Yachty all over.
The rapper himself seems to have other ideas about its failure, variously claiming it was because people “don’t understand” him and because the music on Teenage Emotions was “ahead of my time”: Lil Boat 2’s title accordingly sets the album up as a sequel to his debut 2016 mixtape. But the sunlit, wilfully simplistic melodies and daffy sense of humour that gave the original its appeal are noticeable by their absence. Something of the rapper’s former self hangs around the tune of closer 66 and She Ready’s perky backing – daringly performed on that most abused of instruments, synthesised pan pipes – but there’s nothing here as charming as Minnesota’s off-key falsetto chorus, no hook as engaging as the warped take on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Forbidden Colours that drove Lil Boat’s Good Day. In fact, there’s not much in the way of hooks at all. Lil Boat 2’s main musical currency is a kind of frugal gloom, in which icy electronic drones waft over sparse beats.
Sometimes the musical scenery has a power of its own, as on the discordant two-chord throb of Pop Out, but mostly it seems its purpose is to be unobtrusive, so the listener is forced to concentrate on Lil Yachty’s rapping. This is a bold move that carries a hint of prickly defensiveness about it, as if, for all Lil Yachty’s blithe dismissals of the disparagement heaved his way by everyone from J Cole to Anderson Paak to Funkmaster Flex, something about it has stung him, and he’s determined to prove a point. There’s certainly a hint of prickliness about the subject of almost every track on Lil Boat 2: how much more rich and successful Lil’ Yachty is than everyone else. “I ain’t here to conversate if it ain’t about a dollar,” he drawls on Count Me In. You can say that again.
As a topic, there’s nothing wrong with this – if you’re averse to listening to people tell you how rich they are, hip-hop probably isn’t the genre for you – and at the very least, it’s an improvement on the other subject that seems to preoccupy him, which, alas, is vaginal hygiene (“That pussy pretty, but I still got to sniff it”, “hairy pussy give me allergies” and so on.) The big problem with Lil Boat 2 isn’t so much what Lil Yachty has to say as how he says it. Technically, he isn’t anywhere near as bad a rapper as some people would have you believe – certainly when 2 Chainz or Quavo from Migos appear as guests, they don’t show him up – but he’s by no stretch of the imagination a lyricist gifted enough to breathe new life into a well-worn topic. Oddly flat boasts of the “niggas hate me ‘cos I’m too rich” variety and a lot of extremely repetitious stuff about his fleet of cars are punctuated by lines that are actively clunky. “Bought a new crib,” he brags on NBAYOUNGBOAT, “it’s got several amenities.” Several amenities, eh? What else has your crib got – excellent public transport links?
There’s no great pleasure to be had from saying Lil Boat 2 isn’t very good: it would have been genuinely cheering if it had turned out to be a dexterous up-yours to the hip-hop establishment from a snotty young upstart. Instead you’re struck by the sense that Lil Yachty has let the criticism get to him so much that he’s forgotten where his actual strengths lie. The music that made him famous was lightweight but fun. This, by contrast, feels like a trudge.
