Miami rapper Smokepurpp is best known as Lil Pump’s wingman and understudy, the tag-team partner brawling at his side at shows—a strung-out-seeming, assault rifle-wielding wildman in body armor. He’s the 20-year-old madcap with a baby bottle full of lean tattooed on his stomach, a catchphrase-roaring reject fit for casting in a “Jackass” reboot. There isn’t much else that defines him, and his unruliness doesn’t really enhance his impersonal music. When people talk about SoundCloud rap, a term that’s quickly becoming a catch-all for an entire generation of young rap refugees, they’re speaking specifically about rappers like Purpp. If he’s not posing as G.G. Allin or proudly declaring his music “ignorant,” he’s staring dead-eyed into the void and rapping in circles about nothing in particular. On the heels of his 2017 debut, DEADSTAR, he’s released Bless Yo Trap, a 10-song mixtape made in collaboration with buzzing Canadian producer Murda Beatz. The main thing he accomplishes in its 23-minute running time is exposing himself as a wash-out simply going through the motions.
Bless Yo Trap takes its name from a DEADSTAR cut that felt like a ritual for the Trap Gods, an unholy offering to Young Thug and Chief Keef. The tape lacks that energy. Murda and Purpp made almost the entire project in a night, and it sounds just like that—in the spirit of SoundCloud, the reason this exists is simply because it can. Half the songs on Bless Yo Trap feel halfway finished, rapped without purpose and released into the world with a shrug. Four of them clock in under two minutes, continuing rap’s ongoing obsession with ridiculously short songs.
Like his friend Pump, Smokepurpp needs his songs to be over as quickly as possible. He isn’t quite as committed to unrelenting motion, but his verses are just as empty and unproductive. Where Pump can occasionally thrill, Purpp is mostly stupefying. His punchlines don’t have set-ups, and sometimes he bails out on his own ideas midway through stating them. On most songs, he doesn’t seem to even be following a specific train of thought—he’s pretty much just rambling into the mic, as if he’s been asked to present a project on the spot by a teacher who caught him sleeping in class.
Every once in a while he stumbles upon something mildly droll (“Your bitch tryna find the circumference/And I got hoes in abundance,” or “I don’t wanna fuck I tell her suck my watch”) or wanders in a somewhat interesting direction, as on “Pray”: “My Fiji and diamonds the same thing/Scope on that bitch it got good aim/Choppa make a nigga do the rain dance.” But the songs are all circuitous, often taking roundabout ways to say the exact same things about the color of his diamonds, the nature of his shootouts, or which drugs he’s doing in which designer outfits. His verses are the rap equivalent of Mad Libs. In certain situations, Purpp’s aggro raps seem to channel bluntness, chasing an “idgaf” punk aesthetic. But on Bless Yo Trap, his rapping is simply artless and unimaginative.
The X factor on this project should be Murda, who, having produced hits for Drake (“Portland”), 2 Chainz (“It’s a Vibe,” “4 AM”), Migos (“MotorSport”), and Travis Scott (“Butterfly Effect”), broke through even further earlier this week with Drake’s “Nice for What,” the current No. 1 song in the country. Murda is a versatile beat maker with undeniable instincts; without him, this effort would be a lost cause. His talents can be felt in the spooky synth throb on “123” and the metallic strobe of “Do Not Disturb.” But his beats don’t suit Purpp the way Jersey pioneer (and SoundCloud rap architect) Ronny J’s distorted bass abstractions do. The life expectancy of these songs isn’t much longer than the time it’d take to face a blunt.
There’s little on Bless Yo Trap to suggest that Smokepurpp has much room for growth, and there’s even less to suggest he cares about that. He’s unbothered and myopic, as many are at his age, stoked to be handling more money than he knows what to do with, simply for turning stunts into songs. “Everywhere I go I keep that thang on me/In the club I flex on niggas that are older than me,” he raps on “For the Gang,” which seems to be the general idea: He’s young and he’s already richer than the adults around him, and he got that way doing what he’s doing, so why stop? Which, fair. Purpp isn’t completely incompetent—he’s finding his way around melodies and he is capable at mimicry—but the time is coming when he runs out of tricks, when being able to ape the sounds of the moment won’t be enough, when “SoundCloud rap” itself is another long-forgotten tag on blog posts. Bless Yo Trap suggests that time is rapidly approaching.
