This election season has been dystopian enough to force YG into touring the country with a Trump piñata. Now the Compton rapper’s day-one bro and producer Ty Dolla $ign—an artist not usually known for his politics on anything beyond “these hoes”—offers his own pro-Clinton statement in a new mixtape, Campaign. In its skits, distorted vocals argue in favor of voting as damage control. “She gotta fix these jail policies and everything…but…If all votes count, I’m voting for Hillary. Fuck it,” an uncredited YG declares at the end of “Hello.”
Despite the PSAs, Campaign doesn’t represent a major overhaul of Ty Dolla $ign’s talking points—or the L.A. singer/songwriter/producer’s sound, for that matter. Tracks like “Zaddy” represent the comfort zone of the mixtape: mid-tempo, trap- and hyphy-inflected tunes about responding to booty calls while faded on pills. While Ty’s debut studio album from last year, Free TC*,* was overrun with enormously catchy, even pestilential hooks, Campaign’s sordid refrains are more of the first-thought-best-thought variety.
Still, Campaign’s most acerbic songs are rewarding after an acclimation period; Ty remains obsessed with bending grating and unlikely sounds to his will, as he has been since his breakout days. The Travis-Scott-featuring “3 Wayz” features some of the most oddly detailed synth layering you’ll hear in hip-hop this year against a backfiring electronic drum loop that never quite springs into action. Much like TC’s Hot 100 hit “Blase,” it scans like a flair-less dirge on first listen but gradually takes on a creeping, narcotic appeal.
Elsewhere, against all odds, Ty continues to sell unlikely pop/R&B Jack Johnson posturing, as he perfected on TC’s lascivious, Tish Hyman-penned guitar ballad “Horses in the Stable” (“That I-I can ride/Anytime”). On “Campaign,” he makes a garden-variety Future hook—a retread of his “wicked, wicked, wicked” cadence—shine by juxtaposing even more prurient interruptions. And, most notably, as he did on the TC highlight “Miracle / Whenever,” Ty arranges an a cappella track by his brother TC, who is incarcerated on a life sentence: “No Justice” hits hard, a testimonial to the long-term effects of police discrimination.
It’s nice to see Ty continue to complicate the Mustard-wave script, but also rewarding to revisit the elements that made those songs—even with their collar-tuggingly softcore content—undeniable in the first place. Coming in Campaign’s third act, “Pu$$y” has the satisfying quality of a desperate, last-call room service order. It incorporates all the key ingredients of the original, wiry, subs-busting Dolla/Mustard/YG-originated recipe, with an expected vintage of chorus: “At the end of the day, it’s still my pussy, my pussy, my pussy...” (ad infinitum). Performing his most impressive trick, Ty somehow gets the temperature just right for his frequent collaborator and label head Wiz Khalifa to be bearable—even welcome—in his cameo.
By 2016, pop’s biggest names are no longer hesitating to acknowledge their underground benefactors: Ty is getting features on Top 10 singles as well as songwriting checks. This gives him leverage; Ty is clearly making the music he wants to make, even if the stakes for it remain low. (Free TC debuted to little fanfare at No. 14 on the Billboard Top 200.) Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line. At moments, its political truisms seem to reflect back on that persistence: “It get hard for all of us, but we campaign,” he murmurs on the intro. “It’s easy to quit, or say no, turn the other cheek…nah, we campaignin’ though.”
