JAMES BLAKE and Lil Yachty are a match made in buddy-comedy heaven. The British singer-songwriter and producer has become the go-to white male vocalist selling silken hooks to the likes of Jay-Z, Ye, and Travis Scott, an unlikely outcome for the auteur, whose 2011 selftitled debut featured baroque pop and minimal dance music. Lil Yachty has a chip on his shoulder as the latest 20-something rapper dealing with unearned, unrealistic complaints about lowbrow trap music. But the purists' outrage hasn't stemmed his tide of breezy hits, guest features, and writing and production jobs with Migos and Drake. Bad Cameo, an album-length collab between Blake and Yachty, sees the duo matching wits over heady reverb-drenched hip-hop and electronic-music hybrids that nudge each artist into a more intriguing creative space.
Working with Blake pushes Lil Yachty further away from the southern and midwestern rap trends set or else savvily curated on his Lil Boat and Michigan Boy Boat mixtapes, building on the genre-spelunking of his divisive psych-rock and funk pivot, Let's Start Here. It also turns the page on a dicey stretch of news for his collaborator: Blake struggled in March to explain how Vault, a subscription service he promoted as a "nice solution" to streaming platforms' meager payouts, differs from preexisting utilities, then caught smoke in June for admitting to hating the saxophone enough to wish to delete the instrument from music history.
Bad Cameo casts him in the role of ambient- and dance-music adviser and partners him with an American foil whose commitment to whimsy can make the Brit's demure sensibilities feel refreshing.
Esta historia es de la edición July 15-28, 2024 de New York magazine.
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Esta historia es de la edición July 15-28, 2024 de New York magazine.
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THE BEST ART SHOWS OF THE YEAR
IN NOVEMBER, Sotheby's made history when it sold for a million bucks a painting made by artificial intelligence. Ai-Da, \"the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork auctioned by a major auction house,\" created a portrait of Alan Turing that resembles nothing more than a bad Francis Bacon rip-off. Still, the auction house described the sale as \"a new frontier in the global art market.\"
THE BIGGEST PODCAST MOMENTS OF THE YEAR
A STRANGE THING happened with podcasts in 2024: The industry was repeatedly thrust into the spotlight owing to a preponderance of head-turning events and a presidential-election cycle that radically foregrounded the medium's consequential nature. To reflect this, we've carved out a list of ten big moments from the year as refracted through podcasting.
THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - BEST BOOKS
THE BEST THEATER OF THE YEAR
IT'S BEEN a year of successful straight plays, even measured by a metric at which they usually do poorly: ticket sales. Partially that's owed to Hollywood stars: Jeremy Strong, Jim Parsons, Rachel Zegler, Rachel McAdams (to my mind, the most compelling).
THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR
2024 WAS one big stress test that presented artists with a choice: Face uncomfortable realities or serve distractions to the audience. Pop music turned inward while hip-hop weathered court cases and incalculable losses. Country struggled to reconcile conservative interests with a much wider base of artists. But the year's best music offered a reprieve.
THE BEST TELEVISION OF THE YEAR
IT WAS SURPRISING how much 2024 felt like an uneventful wake for the Peak TV era. There was still great television, but there was much more mid or meh television and far fewer moments when a critical mass of viewers seemed equally excited about the same series.
THE BEST COMEDY SPECIALS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - COMEDY SPECIALS
THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR
PEOPLE LOVED Megalopolis, hated it, puzzled over it, clipped it into memes, and tried to astroturf it into a camp classic, but, most important, they cared about it even though it featured none of the qualities you'd expect of a breakthrough work in these noisy times.
A Truly Great Time
This was the year our city's new restaurants loosened up.
The Art of the Well-Stuffed Stocking
THE CHRISTMAS ENTHUSIASTS on the Strategist team gathered to discuss the oversize socks they drape on their couches and what they put inside them.
