Chicago rapper Valee’s latest mixtape VTM is a low-key, understated project, which is exactly where he shines. Produced entirely by frequent collaborator ChaseTheMoney, whose spare beats carve an enigmatic space with plenty of crevices, VTM is a record whose star raps with demure, evasive style, sticking to the shadows, floating across a tonally ambiguous canvas. Though it builds on the sound of contemporary Midwest street rap with a Southern influence, Valee’s style is unique, sidling up to the listener and working his charms with understated delicacy. Catching his wavelength can require an adjustment; VTM captures an offbeat artist who knows what he’s doing and is just waiting for everyone else to catch up.
Valee is quiet and of slight build, not the type typically pegged as a star. His personality in concert comes less through in-your-face energy than quirky side-steps. He’s known for pulling his pet yorkie, Firarri, out of his backpack on stage. He has a knowing, laconic vocal style, which emerges casually, a self-effacing cloud of smoke. That his often blunt lyrics often play with familiar steal-your-girl subject matter only draws attention to how unorthodox his light-touch vocals and sly flows really are. The way he banks on the familiar in service of the novel extends to his lyrical approach, too, which can suddenly veer quirkily, coolly comic. (“OG Gas so loud it sounded like we gettin’ yelled at,” goes one particularly vivid line on “Vtl.”) There’s something Zen-like about how his focus remains on the here-and-now, on tangible objects rather than the abstract.
His unembellished lyrics find their power enhanced in the way Valee's words drip-drip-drop from rapper to record, delivered as they are with a naturalistic, intuitive sense for flow. His fluid verses often seem less like they were rapped than splashed onto paper. Though his voice is faintly reminiscent of Gucci Mane’s at its most whispery, Gucci has a fairly regimented sense of rhythm. Valee’s style, particularly on the airy “Diamonds,” seems to drift, to slip into its own capricious pocket above the beat’s strict rhythmic demands.
Though they tend to clock in around two minutes, his best songs are unusually sophisticated compositions, thanks to his love for style’s understated ostentatiousness. (Towards the back half, “Dat Way” and “Sketchy,” despite the latter's strong concept, veer towards the generic, sleepy versions of popular Atlanta rap styles, but you’d hope these throwaways won’t make up much of his future.) On “Started Off My Day (Hey),” over a creaking beat that channels the feeling of picking sleep from your eyes while stumbling to the kitchen, Valee sketches a sing-song flow pattern, then disrupts it, taking a long pause for effect: “Sip syrup, sip syrup, that’s twice a four today/And yesterday.../A eight.” This phrasing—the deliberate use of shrinking lines to a lackadaisical poetic effect—feels central to understanding his unpredictable style.
This artful composition and the perplexing mood of the production come together to create a tone of total uncertainty. This contrasts with Valee’s casual sense of control, his placid recounting of objects and images, often of conspicuous consumption: “Tempurpedic mattress, sheets were satin.” When subjects fall outside this range, they’re glossed over, immaterial to him. In “Vtl,” he recounts what could be a dramatic story before dismissing it with a typically unbothered shrug, one which could be taken literally or in the meta sense, about his rapping: “Police pulled over me and I switched topics.” The police are reduced to an irritation on a level slightly below being stuck in an aisle seat on an airplane.
Throughout his work, this seemingly superficial focus on surfaces, on the tactile and material, set against a musical tone of confusion, simultaneously draws attention to what isn't discussed, to what's happened beyond the trivial. In each instance, what would have been the focal point of other, more “serious” artists’ work is relegated to the background, to loom large in our imaginations. Which of course makes enjoying the experiences and lighthearted wit of Valee’s day-to-day that much more alluring. His focus on quiet humor and the here-and-now is an anchor of confidence in a troubled world. One compact couplet captures the dynamic of his delightfully, deceptively deep approach to coolly delivered quips in two succinct lines. The order of the two lines reinforce their hierarchical importance to his world: “Did some pretty fucked up stuff, I don’t know why I ain’t in hell yet/I bought my bitch a yorkie pup and she ain’t even clip her nails yet.”
