I found him by accident while looking for the house duo: Murk, a rapper who just released the least creatively titled album of 2018, the Murkmatic, which is in classic 90s/18 excess fashion, a hundred and forty minutes long. I'm naturally intriqued because I like ambitious musicians (I fucking 4.5'd Culture II for fuxake) and I especially delight in misplaced ambition, which this would surely be, right? I tried to find something about this Murk fellow, though, and like apparently he doesn't exist? Cuz he's not the Christian femcee Murk, nor the late Atlanta-based Molly Murk. Murkmatic is on Deezer, Spotify and iTunes, yet there is, as far as I can see, absolutely no reviews of it anywhere, no press releases, no interviews, big fat nuttin'. It's perplexing. Fuck's RYM profile consists of one guest verse attribution and not even a more telling descriptor than [RAPPER].
The album, I regret to inform y'all, doesn't really reveal anything about Murk that would distinguish him from literally every other trapper on the scene. It's a perfectly competent example of the current state of the genre with nothing whatsoever to make anyone take notice beyond its length, which in this year is practically de rigeur. S'good, of course - trap is nearly impossible to fuck up - but it's got zero diversity, lyrically or musically, and the only people with less charisma than Murk himself is the guests. Imagine 28 variants on "Bodak Yellow" each slightly better than the original but without the insistence on their own hooks. There's no real pop sense, which means nothing on the level " When all of your songs are virtually identical, you're always running the risk of quickly annoying the audience, but on the other hand, if you can knock out multiple songs a day, it's nice to give your fans a big package. No one other than rock critics thinks Kanye's 22-minute albums had anything more to do without giving a more coherent product than just being another wacky-goofy Yeezy gimmick. Trap is a genre, like its forefather Memphis rap, that can accommodate huge marathon-listens, and maybe even benefits from them, so the hunnid-minute mix is a good fit. But neither eight merely mediocre songs or twenty-eight of the same can really rise above "slightly above mediocre."
So we're 2/3rds of the way through the album and back to not knowing anything about this dude other than he has a rolodex full of the Most Hardcore Generic Trap Producers and he says things like "fishscale like Sosa" and honestly I kind of wonder if the whole reason you can find nothing about him is because he's actually a cracker and wants anonymity to say the n-word every other line, cuz he really does sound white sometimes. God, I hope not. Unless that is true, which would be reprehensible, the music just isn't interesting enough to warrant or explain the weird secrecy around it. Basically, it's RIYL: trappers who name their album a variant on Illmatic in 2018 and write songs called "Foreign" and in no way justifies it's length. 3/5
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