Photo Credit: Gunner Stahl
Not since Tyler, the Creator reinvented himself with soul-inspired records like Flower Boy and IGOR has a rapper reinvented himself as 25-year-old Lil Yachty does on Let’s Start Here. So, what in the world happened? The viral hit “Poland,” released earlier this winter, hinted that Lil Yachty was about to climb higher up on the tier list of rappers, but nothing could have prepared us for Let’s Start Here.
It all starts with “the BLACK seminole,” a 21st-century take on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, complete with larger-than-life guitar solos, pounding drums, and Diana Gordon’s imitation of Clare Torry’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” – all in one song. It’s a song as intense as it is unexpected – arguably the most drastic artistic change of direction trap music has ever seen. “I created this because I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist,” Miles Parks McCollum, professionally known as Lil Yachty, said during a listening event. “Not just some SoundCloud rapper, not some mumble rapper. Not some guy that just made one hit.”
But for all its impressive ambitions and the overwhelming surprise factor, Let’s Start Here. is far from faultless. After the Thundercat-funky third track, “running out of time,” things soon turn mushy. It appears that the only thing that truly sets songs like “:(failure:)” and “THE zone” apart from his earlier work is musical ambition: Yachty is still a mumble rapper heavily relying on auto-tune – here, he’s just having something way more interesting to mumble over. Eight tracks in, we’re finding another highlight in “drive ME crazy!” – proof that Lil Yachty at his finest is capable of coming up with R&B just as silky and smooth as Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak – although it’s once again Diana Gordon doing most of the singing.
While Let’s Start Here. loses its direction somewhere along the 57-minute runtime, and despite Lil Yachty unsurprisingly sometimes falling back into misogynist lyrics (“pRETTy”), this project might be just that: a place to reinvent the artist Lil Yachty. While his space rock interpretations are still too abstracted, his psychedelic jams are too absent of memorable melodies, and his auto-tuned singing prevents him from fully entering the soul train, Let’s Start Here. has already done what he wanted to achieve, at least partly: At his core, he is still a mumble rapper – but now he’s found a way to push his music forward – maybe even an entire genre? I mean, what are Trippie Redd and Yung Thug to do now?
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