It’s a good bet that that “How?” and “Why?” are recurring questions in Valee’s inner monologue. As a child, the precocious Chicagoan would toy around with his home’s electrical wiring. In a fit of inspiration—and in a moment of divine intervention, considering its riskiness—he managed to reroute a light switch through his parents’ surround-sound receiver, so that when the bass kicked in, the lights flashed on. He’d rapped occasionally in high school, but after graduation the cat-curious polymath started a business doing low-level repairs for Chicago-area schools. An impulsive trip to a Guitar Center spawned a home recording studio and, a few experimental years and six mixtapes later, a contract with Kanye West’s GOOD Music. With GOOD Job, You Found Me, Valee’s unique style, honed during cloistered, solitary sessions in his loft apartment, gains the audience it dearly deserves.
Valee (“Vuh-lay”) sounds like a housecat pacing on a narrow windowsill. Or maybe he sounds like Michael Jackson’s pinpoint footwork on a magical, light-up sidewalk in the “Billie Jean” video. Or maybe he sounds like a light rain on a corrugated steel awning. His nearest analog is 21 Savage, but where the Atlantan’s barely-vacillating monotone lands with the force of a baseball bat on a windshield, Valee’s voice seems to gambol weightlessly, a fluffy white cloud amid crisp blue springtime skies. On the ribald, wildly catchy “Shell,” his voice is delicate, bordering on conspiratorial. Were he not backed by the kind of thunderous beats that would’ve made the lights flicker in his childhood home, his music might be denuded of its menace.
Just as intriguing as the incongruity of Valee’s downy voice and heavy instrumentals (typically produced by Rio Mac or ChaseTheMoney) is his hardcore punk-style commitment to brevity: GOOD Job crams six songs into 14 concise minutes, and the longest, a remix of “Miami” featuring Pusha T, falls just short of the three-minute mark. For an artist whose lyrics have an uncomplicated relationship with consumption—he’s in favor of it, particularly as it pertains to drugs, designer clothing, and, surprisingly, RC cars—the self-restraint is fascinating. He’s not subverting trap-rap form with overwrought showpiece onanism or any outward political awareness, but self-abnegation. Most songs are a single verse, if there’s a verse at all; the airy “Vlone,” which comes nearer to avant-garde dance music than it does to any particular rap subgenre, is just a chorus. Once he’s fully expressed an idea, Valee moves on without fireworks or fanfare.
Unfortunately, half the ideas on GOOD Job were used on previous projects. This version of “Shell,” with a rare-for-Valee second verse, appeared on his 1988, and his biggest hit, the rumbling “I Got Whatever,” was on 12:12 Again, as was the original of “Miami,” only modified here by a fairly staid Pusha T verse. Though the EP is largely excellent, with fewer than seven minutes of new material it struggles to serve its two opposing masters. Ostensibly, GOOD Job is art unmolested by corporatist interest. But functionally it doubles as a press release meant to introduce Valee to West’s audience—a painfully normal crowd likely unattuned to rap’s odder, underground offerings. But Valee’s capture could prove valuable for GOOD Music, a label otherwise bereft of young, intriguing talent (and historically unable to nurture it). If they allow the dreadlocked Chicagoan to follow his most outré instincts, and encourage him to whisper consumerist sweet somethings for two minutes at a time, they could have their first bona fide new star in recent memory.
