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A$AP Mob featuring Joey Bada$$, Kirk Knight, Nyck Caution, Meechy Darko & Zombie Juice “What Happens”

My favorite type of rap song is the posse cut, no question. I just love the thrill of hearing as many rappers on a track as possible, and the contrast of voices and approach to lyrics and flow. I’m a Wu-Tang guy, and they are unquestionably the gold standard for this sort of thing. A lot of that comes down to RZA’s production – not just the aesthetics of it, but also his remarkable instinct for sequencing and structuring rap verses for maximum musical impact. He wasn’t just hearing the Wu guys as rappers, but as approximations of instruments in an arrangement – Ghostface is a trumpet, Method Man is a sax, U-God is a tuba. (Thinking of U-God in this way will make you like him a lot more, I promise. That and appreciating how much of his style is lifted from reggae toasting.)

Anyway, here we are in 2017 and RZA is revisiting his greatest strength, but with a totally different lineup of rappers. “What Happens” is an impressive congregation of nine young NYC rappers, representing three different crews – A$AP Mob, Pro Era, and Flatbush Zombies. It’s sorta like a present day equivalent of the “Buddy” remix, where De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, and Queen Latifah all converged to capture the spirit of that moment in New York rap. The tone is very different, of course. The track approximates the tension and grit of classic Wu-Tang while having the digital gloss of latter day RZA material. I love the way the beat stutters, and how it puts this jagged frame around each rapper. The mic gets tossed around a lot through the cut, so key voices like Rocky, Ferg, and Joey keep popping up through the entire song. This is a smart approach, as there’s not as much variation of timbre and cadence in their voices so you can’t rely on major tonal or stylistic shifts to signal movement, but there’s more than enough energy just in hearing these guys bounce off each other.

Buy it from Amazon.