future tickets

Attrition. That’s the game we thought Future was playing. We thought he was playing that game because that’s the game nearly every rapper’s been playing since Lil Wayne forgot which songs were going to be on Tha Carter 3 and it went platinum in a week. Flood the block. Drown the consumer. Saturate the game like Paula Deen wielding butter in a kitchen.

Let the artistes take time to think about the world at large and their (our) place in it and then painstakingly craft projects that detail their findings. For rappers like Wayne and Future, it’s quantity over quality, every time. If you could strike a balance between the two, great—if not, no worries, just keep pushing. The cream will rise to the top, the duds will fall away like Que.

With this model, there’s no room for big picture thinking, or a grandiose vision that unifies the output. There is only the grind. To many, the grind is what got Future to where he is today: The first artist to notch two back-to-back number one albums, FUTURE and HNDRXX, in back-to-back weeks. But’s that’s too reductive an explanation.

Having sat with the albums now, it’s tough to believe that this wasn’t orchestrated.

Future clawed his way to the top in 2017 not by melding lucid gutter visions and passionate love songs hedged by paranoia and distrust, but by proving that the grind is in service of something other than itself. His mainstream false-start and mixtape run all led to these twin projects. When consumed together, FUTURE and HNDRXX bear this out.

Two 17-track albums that, on the surface, play to two different audiences, Future’s latest projects work best as a pair. Both lean into a lifestyle afforded by someone with immense riches and an opiate addiction that borders on suicidal. Both deal with gain and loss of money, friends, and love. Both seem to exist in a world inhabited only by Future and a very select group of people. In other words, they are the distillation of everything we’ve come to expect from Future’s art in 2017.

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