Lil Uzi Vert Just Wants to Rock on the Sprawling ‘Pink Tape’
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Lil Uzi Vert is one of the most ambitious rappers of their generation, a true-blue astral traveler who sees the form’s traditions as a matrix to warp in unexpected ways. Their goal is the sort of mental and emotional liberation achievable only through absolute stimulation: the most colors, the biggest sounds, the hardest raps conceivable. Their first two LPs, 2017’s Luv Is Rage 2 and 2020’s Eternal Atake, showed remarkable progress in this aim. They pushed and pulled various strands of contemporary hip-hop — blown-out Soundcloud beats, cavernous psychedelia, flows from Atlanta and Chicago — to fit an expansive vision of the genre.
Their long-awaited Pink Tape finds an artist still relentlessly barreling forward, leaving everyone in the dust–including, quite possibly, many listeners. The Pink Tape is a 26-track, 90-minute gauntlet in which Uzi’s maximalism finds its fullest expression imaginable: galaxy-smashing rap-rock. Everything is as big as it can be. Uzi samples a WWE theme song at length, interpolates Eiffel 65’s “Blue,” and covers System Of A Down’s “Chop Suey” pretty much verbatim. It’s superhero theme music from an anime-worshiping genre apostate — an album of light-cycle chases and samurai clashes set to Def Leppard shredding.
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Is it too much? Reader, it’s way too much. But it’s hard to say it doesn’t work when “too much” was clearly the point. It’s less “a swing and a miss” than “a swing that rips open a hole in the time-space continuum.” Early tracks like “Suicide Doors” and “Amped” set a clear tonal pallette, full of wraithlike riffs, mawkish death-metal growls, and earth-rupturing bass pulses. While traditional Uzi party-starters still pop up, eventually the rock influences take over entirely. The anthemic “Nakamura” and unlikely Bring Me The Horizon collaboration “Werewolf” have a deranged conviction, sweeping the listener up in their high-stakes, high-fantasy melodrama. They seem designed to ignite moshpits and TikTok reaction videos in equal measure.
Much of the production on Pink Tape is from Uzi’s long-time collaborators Working On Dying, and they occasionally tap into the effervescent pulse of their previous work, like Brandon Finessin’s almost corporeal beat for “Spin Again.” Shame, then, that it’s the shortest track on an album that lets every other idea play out for three-plus minutes. It’s easy to imagine an alternate version of Pink Tape that lets all these thoughts coexist as gnarled, 90-second fragments, as Playboi Carti did on the shocking Whole Lotta Red.
But then, it is not for us to question Uzi. The entire point of Pink Tape is their unabashed expression of self. Uzi’s lyrics rarely translate well to the page — their aims are generally more sensory — but there’s a clarity to some of the confessional tracks here that provides some insight. “Rehab” is a lighters-up arena-rock singalong in honor of the people who helped the rapper sober up over a recent 7-month stint. More remarkable still is “Days Come And Go,” a Drake-like late-album tell-all. (“Got his personal number, but I never called JAY-Z,” Uzi raps, more abashed than proud.) The transition from the hyper-masculine posturing of the album’s beginning to its euphorically over-the-top death-metal outro (on which Uzi raps, “You feel blue / Have a pink day”) reveals this album as intentional in its structure and its provocations as Uzi’s previous two. The album at times fees like a confrontation with gender identity played out as a confrontation between genres, all at a final-boss intensity only Uzi could pull off.
That being said, Pink Tape unquestionably loses much of what made those earlier records so remarkable: word-drunk flows; breathless hooks that emerged like mutations of the verses; beats that pushed past Pi’erre Bourne squiggles into Animal Collective territory. It’s easy to miss all of that, when what we have instead is Uzi’s very own Rebirth. Almost as acknowledgment of this, the album concludes with a couple of fan-service bonus tracks, including the Luv Is Rage 2-era cut “Zoom.” The rapper’s vault is famously vast — Don Cannon says they recorded almost 700 tracks for this record alone — and it’s likely that many more fan-satisfying tracks will emerge on EPs, mixtapes, and deluxe editions to come. Either way, Pink Tape will stand as a statement: a lightning rod, a litmus test, a turning point, maybe even a troll. It’s a lot. There’s no telling where Uzi goes next, and that’s probably the point.
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