We know what a new Future album means at this point. Too much dissociated sex. Trust issues. Insecurities that turn into mind games with the same women he’s hoping will save him from himself. Rapper soap opera stuff. Numbing all that pain by going on The Lost Weekend-style binges of booze and drugs. The Real Me is a little different, though—not because all 22 tracks don’t contain the same anxieties that have been haunting his acidic ATL soul music since Honest, but because it’s just as much about living up to the reputation of being Future: the blurred lines between his true identity and his artist persona, and how fucking crazy it makes him feel that he can barely tell the difference. It’s a meta look at the long-term effects of more than a decade as a massively popular rapper whose popularity is based on digging into the darkest parts of himself.
Admittedly, Future spiraling over the ways mega-fame and money have permanently changed him isn’t nearly as fascinating or endearing as Future spiraling over getting his heart broken—à la his Monster era in the mid 2010s—but hey, at least it feels real. “Life get crazy when you get everything you thought you needed,” he sings like a zombie on the washed-out “Cast a Spell,” before muttering something about ketamine and how the latest fling he met during his nonstop travels saved him. Midway through “Radio,” which has this airy bounce that reminds me of the tender moments on 2017’s Hndrxx, he grapples with the pressures of not messing up what he’s got going on because so many people depend on him. André 3000 pops into “No Misery” sounding like Zordon for a monologue about what the experience of listening to Future is like: “We all on edge watching it,” he says. That’s probably a trip for Future, knowing that people gravitate to the sensation of listening to him come apart at the seams. In his warped verses he lives up to that expectation, wailing about girls purposely tracking him down when he’s hammered to try to get pregnant.
What’s off-putting in Future’s search for The Real Me is how often his frustrations turn into resentment toward the women around him. Plenty of women in Future songs feel like side characters in his mission to claw his way back from rock bottom, but here they’re more like faceless props passing in and out of his life until he discards them for showing any sort of personality. He’s never been a feminist, but his best stuff is complicated by real yearning for love and affection, telling stories based on relationships that he can’t stop torpedoing. “I don’t wanna let you down, I don’t wanna let you down,” he chanted on 2017’s “Solo,” knowing he probably will. The Real Me’s lack of emotional intimacy, its lack of regret, just makes it seem like he hates these girls, especially since there’s hardly any specificity about anything other than their graphic sex.
“Build a Bitch” features the kind of gentle beat by Allen Ritter and Dre Moon (who also produced “Solo”) that Future used to hop on to try to right his wrongs, or at least victim-card his way out of problems. This time, he raps about assembling his perfect woman: someone who doesn’t need anything but is always horny and who is also fine with being filmed giving him a blowjob in the morning “right when she yawning.” On “California Girls,” the sweet instrumentation and chilled singing is undercut by the depiction of his ideal as a Lebanese girl “worshipping my cock, she won’t get off her knees.” It feels like he says “cock” on this album more than the homepage on a porn site. A few songs try to course-correct that sourness with vulnerability, like on “If I Could,” when he mutters, “I love my girl, it’s hard to tell her how I feel,” but that doesn’t happen enough. He’s too busy hardening the performed masculinity of the Future character in a midlife crisis instead of excavating the feelings underneath that.
What does a 42-year-old world-famous bachelor losing his mind actually sound like? I’d argue it’s the side of The Real Me that’s mostly Future expressing himself through goofy vocal tricks and cartoonish musical decisions. I’m thinking of the Makonnen-ish burnt-out melodies of “Hollywood,” where he’s wallowing around like Bojack Horseman, and the rhythmic whistling of “Tank Top Pluto.” The high-pitched ad-libbing that shakes up the boredom of “Konnichiwa,” and the stubbed-toe whimpers of the glacial “Feeling I Give.” I’m even into the hilarious pig squeal of “2018”—a nod to his all-time guest verse on “King’s Dead”—and his attempt to live like it’s 2014 again with the random ratchet throwback “Alice,” which is begging for a Kid Ink feature. Now that is the doing-anything music of a man going through some things.
