With YG and DJ Mustard referring to themselves as millennial analogues to Snoop and Dre, and artists both prudent (Drake, Trey Songz) and floundering (Chris Brown, Jennifer Lopez) inching westward for a piece of Mustard’s sound, it’s easy to mistake L.A. for the center of the current West Coast rap resurgence. But further up the Pacific Coast Highway, Sage the Gemini and Iamsu! of the Bay area’s Heartbreak Gang collective have refined a sound that draws influence from frenetic dance-informed NorCal hyphy music and L.A. jerk music, with hints of the sleek “crunk&B” of Jazze Pha and Ciara. In 2014, both artists are at a peculiar stage of fame: Iamsu!’s found success playing wingman to other artists, and Sage is sitting on gold and platinum viral hits that the average listener might not be able to recognize as his.
Sage’s debut single “Red Nose” worked its way into the Billboard Hot 100 thanks to its association with the Bay area’s yiking dance movement; its chorus likens the dance’s signature lateral twerking motion to that of a wet dog shaking its head dry, and the use of “Red Nose” as a soundtrack to scores of yiking-focused Vines and Youtube videos lent it chart traction. Follow-up single “Gas Pedal” further advanced Sage’s star, bowing out in the lower rungs of the Top 40 and moving over a million units in the process; third single “College Drop” tried to wrangle “Red Nose” and “Gas Pedal”’s successes and achieved modest success on the hip-hop songs chart. Sage’s instructional dance floor drills are presently his livelihood, but he’s a smart kid who knows he can’t spend the remainder of his career telling women how and where to shake their asses. So his debut album Remember Me arrives with a mission: keep listeners on their feet, but show some range.
Remember Me marks a respectable attempt at achieving that goal; its opening title track matches sped-up mobb-music sonics to autobiographical nerd-makes-good testimonials, and the rest of the album peppers a parade of carefree party music with pathos. A lot of the album is kiddie-pool deep and full of pith for jealous onlookers, pep talks for struggling rappers, boasts about girls wooed out from under lames, celebrations of new money, and a healthy shock of incredulity that any of this is happening. Closer “Second Hand Smoke” pushes its luck on a foggy anti-drug metaphor never quite comes together, but Sage’s affable aw-shucks charm and sparingly busy delivery draw attention off the goofiness of the premise. Remember Me is short on hard-fought insights and heavy on Sage and Su’s goofball wordplay and sharp hook construction, but it radiates the confident cool of studio rats perfectly at ease rhyming with friends over homemade beats.
Sage the Gemini’s greatest strengths are compositional. He produced six of Remember Me’s twelve songs, and those cuts showcase both a mercenary efficiency with post-hyphy club bangers and a questing desire to turn them inside out. Sage knocks out all the curt uptempo numbers early on “Bad Girls” and “Go Somewhere”, both built around martial drum patterns and brash synths that oscillate in and out of key. By the album’s midway point, all the strip club-friendly dance tutorials are spent as Sage comes with the change-up in “Put Me On”, a bit of clownish, spectral video game boss lair music with disorienting drum construction.
Remember Me’s back half committedly illuminates the frayed edges of Sage’s sound: the brusque 808 infused trap excursion “Down on Your Luck” trades Migos-esque flow missives with singer August Alsina, “Mad at Me” pops collars over jazzy guitar and pulsing cymbals care of HBK associate Jay Ant, and “Don’t You” works wonders with a one-chord hook. “Second Hand Smoke” possesses a brittle lyrical conceit and is garbled in concept, but its ornately layered melodies make for an authoritative closer.
As an exercise in showcasing Sage the Gemini’s capabilities beyond booty music, Remember Me succeeds by keeping its sights reasonable and coasting past them on Sage’s garrulous charm and studio know-how. Periodically, he trips, and we end up with a dancefloor sargeant clunkily fishing out of his depth. But the writing here is always affable and occasionally gratifyingly personal, and barring a few cuts, the production is never less than engaging. Sage modulates from partied-out excess to spoils-of-newfound-fame reflection rather well, steering mercifully clear of lofty ideas and tough-guy posturing he’d look out of place assuming. Remember Me keeps its mood light and its stakes low, and in the process delivers a much needed breezy counterpoint to all the knotty, fatalistic shit coming out of HBK’s downstate peers that’s every bit as true to Cali as the gangsters and the thinkers.
