Rick Rubin is music royalty, but his name hasn’t always been a watchword for groundbreaking taste. For every Run-D.M.C. or Beastie Boys, there’s been an Ed Sheeran, a Linkin Park, an Avett Brothers and now, a Towkio. The Chicago rapper, a close friend of Chance and Vic Mensa, released his debut studio album, WWW. on Rubin’s American Recordings label last week, and if the record is any indication, he’s destined to become the latest exhibit in the Rubin wing of commercially successful but artistically dubious enterprises.
WWW. stands for World Wide .Wav, a sequel to Towkio’s 2015 release, .Wav Theory. That record laid out the rapper’s philosophy of life, essentially, the butterfly effect theory: everything is connected to everything else. It’s a bit of a funny sentiment coming from Towkio because if there’s one thing that defines the record, it’s his clear disconnect with the gang of skilled artists brought on to assist him. With his feints at wisdom and his strange self-absorption, Towkio can feel a little bit like a friend who shows up to hang out after having eaten an eighth of mushrooms. Maybe he is having a transcendent experience but everyone else is checking the time every ten minutes, wondering when he’ll stop explaining the secrets of the tides and want to just, like, watch a movie.
It can be hard to tell whether Towkio is a talented guy who’s just not working hard or a hack with an extraordinary work ethic. He pays little attention to the excellent production he’s gifted throughout WWW., and his lyrics are, for the most part, a deck of platitudes, punctuated by sub-par punchlines and a pettiness that goes poorly with his enlightened posturing. On “Loose,” a tremulous, bouncy little beat from Louis the Child, he ignores the pockets created by the bass, rapping in an inexplicably aggressive tone about how he’s changed, but still breathes the same air as he used to, and is “lookin’ at the game like a daycare.” (Yeah, I don’t know either.) Then, when the beat accommodates his aggression, he can’t keep up and resorts to doing his best imitation of Pharrell on “Lapdance.”
But Towkio has a gift for choosing collaborators and the record is partially saved by danceable beats from Lido, Louis, Knox Fortune, and others, as well as some excellent hooks. Any song with a feature becomes something of a competition between Towkio and his peers: can he ruin the track before they have a chance to redeem it? It’s unclear whether SZA’s performance justifies “Morning View,” a ballad whose meditative opening moment is swiftly punctured by a misplaced falsetto. But she does get a chance to assert herself, using her verse to transport us back into the narrative tangle of Ctrl.
Towkio occasionally flips the script. His first verse on “Forever,” makes the song seem like it’s going to be one of the strongest on the record before his buddy Mensa struts in and sprays crude stick figures over his friend’s lovingly crafted wildstyle. And while the back half of the album is less memorable, that modesty gives Towkio a moment to stop trying to make something epic and simply make something solid. His opening verse on the standout “Hate to Love” is sung, which helps him avoid issues with the beat. He uses it to paint a rough but compelling picture of how a failed relationship pushes a person away from other people and toward drugs.
But the most notable thing about WWW. is how Towkio promoted it. Two days before its release, he “dropped” the record from space, meaning that he rode a helium balloon 19 miles into the stratosphere, listened to his own record, and then parachuted back down to earth. He seemed genuinely worried that he might die during his trip, but that kind of bravery, the brashness of a bold decision and the commitment to carry it out, makes sense for the artist born Preston Oshita, who often seems like he’s looking for shortcuts: to wisdom, to superstardom, to artistic transcendence. On WWW., it feels as if he had no interest in a less flashy but more consistent sort of commitment, the kind it takes simply to make a good record.
