On Bossman Dlow’s breakout hit, he couldn’t help but lie. “I’m driving the Bentley Bentayga like I don’t love my life,” he boasted on “Get in With Me,” which would eventually be included on last spring’s freewheeling Mr Beat the Road. An evocative image, but a preposterous one coming from someone who frequently sounds like the happiest rapper on the Earth. The Florida native, whose style most directly evokes the careening, comical Michigan rappers of the late 2010s, seems to love it all: the bloggers and lovers nattering in his phone, the rice that’s shifted from diet staple to overpriced steakhouse side dish, the $6,000 shoes he can only wear once (they hurt his feet).
His new record, last month’s buoyant Dlow Curry, is defined by this delirious consumption: half-million-dollar cars full of ash and fleets of black trucks waiting to pick him up at the airport, dope-stained kitchenware on marble countertops, extra-friendly Neiman Marcus valets, cologne and belts and Cuban links and, on “Mo Chicken,” more chicken. It’s ravenous. Dlow uses all of these goods and services to illustrate a world that has high stakes, but only in the way Looney Tunes has high stakes—you picture the cops on his tail pancaked flat against a mural of a street, the women at his club appearances with hearts popping out of their eyes and steam coming from their ears.
Dlow Curry is effective in part because its shape is the perfect vessel for Dlow’s style. Its 20 songs clock in at just under 50 minutes, tracks often cut off before a second full verse, and the tempo never lags. For some writers with limited subject matter, this would invite redundancy. But Dlow is such an expressive vocalist that each blown red light and grimacing mall security guard sounds as if it’s his very first. And so, when the purely consumptive lines, or the otherwise circular boasts about hustling, are joined by Dlow’s favorite motif—begging a coach to put him in the game to win for his team—his record has a momentum, even desperation, that makes the glee feel cathartic.
His sense of economy applies in the micro, too. Dlow is not quite a master of the clipped, epigrammatic style of early Jeezy—a close analogue given his exhortations of listeners—but he occasionally approaches that level. “Any time the crackers run up, I run,” he raps on “The Biggest Pt. 2.” “Any time the crackers lock me up, I post bond.” (On the chorus of “Dlow Gucci,” he sums up his exceptional life succinctly: “Baby, I ain’t normal.”) Short as the songs tend to be, they seem primed to be diced into even smaller components—Instagram captions, 10-second videos, the shards of larger artworks that are reassembled into the digital wallpaper of our lives.
Maybe that explains the runaway popularity of a rapper who, while almost endlessly charismatic, is not exactly writing classical pop songs. What’s most impressive, though, is that in the context of a full album, these brief glimpses of the hilarious or magnetic are synthesized into a frenetic blur that mirrors Dlow’s whole ethos. It’s easier to get lost in Dlow Curry than the immediacy of its songs might suggest. All the outlandishness comes to feel natural, intuitive, even if it isn’t exactly the truth.
Correction: Bossman Dlow’s hometown is Port Salerno, not Tallahassee. This review has been updated.
