Here’s a fun challenge: Cue up DuFlocka Rant 2 through headphones at a reasonable volume and while listening to it try to accomplish anything that requires even a modicum of concentration. Read a magazine article. Write a blog post. Shop for cat food. The average person will find even simple tasks like these considerably more difficult than usual, if not flat-out impossible. Waka Flocka Flame is the most attention-starved character in hip-hop, and he’s not satisfied with simply grabbing your attention; he needs to dominate it, to the exclusion of everything else. Waka Flocka Flame does not want you multitasking while he’s on.
Hence the throat-shredding scream-raps (sometimes layered two or three deep) suspended in a matrix of frame-rattling bass, flickering hi-hats, and anxiety-inducing one-bar synth loops that form the foundation of Flocka’s aesthetic. Each track on DuFlocka Rant 2 fills every available nook and cranny of the audible spectrum with noise and chaos. Trying to ignore it in any way is hopeless.
This kind of insistence upon your attention is normally a turnoff, but Flocka makes a compelling case for letting him dominate your senses. The pleasure that I take in listening to DuFlocka Rant 2 is less like what I get from the usual mixtape and more like why I love certain strains of extreme metal, where the gratification comes from surrendering to the onslaught, and letting yourself be obliterated as it passes over you and through you.
On DR2’s spoken word intro Flocka boasts, among other things, that when he dropped Flockaveli back in 2010 that “hip-hop changed,” and it’s hard to argue with him. That album not only made him a star, but also made teen production wizard Lex Luger one as well, and helped solidify the modern trap sound’s stranglehold on mainstream hip-hop. It also, as many of his critics complained, dealt a considerable blow to the notion of that good rappers need to be good writers, which had already been weakened by a generation of Southern rappers who were less interested in competing with Northerners lyrically than economically. Flocka’s admission early on that he rapped primarily for the checks and not because he considered himself an artist sent up howls from hip-hop’s more serious corners.
But if Waka Flocka Flame has lowered the standards for writing in the rap world-- and the wave of poetry-averse Flockaveli fans that make up the Chicago drill scene, for instance, suggests that he has-- he’s made up for it by introducing a level of catharsis that it had rarely achieved before. Records like DR2 aren’t just distractions, they’re sonic power washers blasting out whatever psychic residue you have gunking up the corners of your brain. If you’re in the market for a moment of mental ablation you might want to try the larynx-ruining primal scream that Flocka emits in the middle of “Hood Rich”.
The qualities of its screaming chaos aside, does DuFlocka Rant 2 offer up anything that you can’t find on the original DuFlocka Rant or any of his other mixtapes? Sure. “Can’t Do Golds” has one of the most straightforward pop hooks that he’s delivered yet. “Tax Money” has an intriguing instrumental track (produced by Purps on the Beat) based around low orchestral horns that suggests that more rap producers should be ripping off the score to Inception. And overall there’s just more of a tightness, a strong feeling that the manic combustibility of his first few records is now being concentrated and refined into a weapons-grade explosiveness, and that whenever Flockaveli 2 drops it’s going to leave a crater on the rap landscape.
