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Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

Desiigner silences his
naysayers — for now

MUSIC REVIEW

“New England” fails
to prove Desiigner has

staying power

By ANAY KATYAL

Summer Senior Arts Editor

For a man whose life has

changed so drastically since Feb-
ruary, Desiigner has managed to
keep himself
from glorious-
ly crashing and
burning off
of the hype-
machine cliff.
Congratula-
tions are in
order for that,
I guess. For
a lot of people like myself, in the
time between the release of The
Life of Pablo — Desiigner’s intro-
duction to the mainstream rap
game — and the release of New
English, a lot of time was spent
trying to figure out what to make
of Desiigner’s talents. Is he a
simple culture vulture riding the
coattails of the Atlanta rap trend
or is there more to the guy beyond
his rapaciously hype demeanor?
With the release of his much-
anticipated debut mixtape, Desii-
gner (fortunately) shows he’s more
than someone who benefitted
from positive circumstance, but
his potential staying power (and
potential legacy beyond a brief
Kanye West cosign) is still a ques-
tion that remains up in the air.

New English is far from an

artistic pinnacle among hip hop’s
new wave of trap rookies, let alone
hip hop itself — it’d be a farce to
consider it otherwise. That being
said, there’s something endear-
ingly brutish and primitive to
Desiigner’s music that piques a
part of my brain I didn’t know
existed (namely, the part that
wants to burn and destroy what-
ever’s around me). Much like
“Panda,” Desiigner managed to
channel stupefying levels of hype
in his songs while remaining
charmingly unintelligible all the
same; hell, Desiigner manages the
impossible by having all fourteen

songs feel both completely alike
and different at the same time.
Things could’ve gone south quick-
ly for Desiigner had he released a
project that fell far from the qual-
ity of the song that made his name
in the first place (a common trope
among hip hop’s rags-to-riches
stories), but Desiigner and his fans
can find solace in the fact that
New English doesn’t fall far from
the testosterone-heavy, “Panda”-
esque tree.

New English is a welcome sight

for patrons of Kanye and GOOD
Music, considering West’s label
has seen its fair share of duds and
promising acts that never man-
aged to capitalize on their hype.
That being said, while Desiigner
has something to show for him-
self beyond “Panda,” New English
isn’t exactly a release that’ll stay
on rotation months after its debut
(largely due to the aforementioned
lack of song variance). Songs like
“Roll Wit Me,” “Da Day” and
“Zombie Walk” all feature an
enraged Desiigner yelling stereo-
typical trap-influenced adlibs (and
fairly meaningless lyrics) into the
microphone. Rarely do songs devi-
ate from that vibe, so much so that
the project’s adherence to cohe-
sion in light of the style of “Panda”
becomes its own undoing.

With this release, Desiigner

also manages to place himself in
the middle of a seemingly bur-
geoning wave occurring in rap
music, a wave that can be accu-
rately dubbed as “post-lyrical
rap.” With its generic trap hooks
and familiar braggadocios, hyper-
bolic lyrics describing the ways
of the caricatured Atlanta trap
life, Desiigner is one of many new

examples showing how lyrical
substance is devolving toward
obsolescence in the rap game. Art-
ists like Desiigner are purveyors
of “vibes” more so than authentic-
ity, swapping the credibility and
realness (of their own lives) for
the opportunity to craft a musical
aura shaped around preconceived
notions of the rockstar drug-
dealing ways of Atlanta’s finest
fugitives. It isn’t necessarily a
bad thing — especially when such
songs can provoke alarming, brut-
ish levels of excitement — but it’s
disappointing to see the genre’s
starlets going towards the way
of what fits the current hip-hop
zeitgeist rather than building a
sustainable musical foundation for
themselves to prosper off of in the
long term.

In releasing New English, Desii-

gner does successfully manage
to stave off some of the criticism
that’s been thrown his way. The
disparity between “Panda” and
the rest of his songs is largely non-
existent, a testament to the man’s
consistency. But if Desiigner
wants to stick around once the
dust surrounding rap’s exaggerat-
ed trap trend settles (and hip hop
moves on to something new), the
question remains whether Desii-
gner will co-opt something new,
wither away into irrelevancy or
actually manage to create a reper-
toire of music he can successfully
call his own (something beyond
his most recent project, that is).
New English is something Desii-
gner can show for himself in the
face of his doubters, but he’ll need
something a bit more substantial
to avoid being a faded memory of
one of Kanye’s past projects.

GOOD MUSIC

“Kanye, I’m cool now! I promise!”

‘Brain’ is Dead

By ALEX INTNER

Summer Managing Arts Editor

Someone, please tell the Kings

that they need to take a deep
breath and just relax for a second.
Robert
and

Michelle King
(who
created

and ran “The
Good
Wife”

for seven sea-
sons) are back
on
television

only a couple
months
after

the shaky end-
ing of their drama with a show that
could not be more different from
their
long-running,
acclaimed

series. Where “Wife” was level-
headed and serious in its discus-
sion
of
politics,
“BrainDead”

takes its ideas to a new and rather
absurd level. While there’s a fun
series somewhere in its DNA, with
the amount of setup the first two
episodes had to them, the show
couldn’t move past the bare-bones
of its premise. The Kings seem
to be letting the story breathe to
the point where it loses a sense of
cohesion and becomes a muddled
mess.

“BrainDead”
follows
Laurel

Healy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead,
“10 Cloverfield Lane”), the sister
of powerful Democratic United
States senator Luke Healy (Danny
Pino, “Cold Case”), who enters the
world of politics to work in her
brother’s office. She starts when a
partisan battle is about to cause a
government shutdown. Through
her work with Luke, she deals
with Gareth Ritter (Aaron Tveit,
“Grease Live”), the young and
charming assistant to Republican
senator Red Wheatus (Tony Shal-
houb, “We Are Men”). Meanwhile,
a group of bugs crash to Earth on a
meteor and are brought to Wash-
ington D.C. by the Smithsonian.
Throughout the first two episodes,

they’re seen crawling into people’s
ears, causing their brains to pop
out of their heads and explode.

Within the arrival of the bugs

and the largely unseen havoc they
wreak on D.C. is a weird story that
the show unfolds slowly but sure-
ly. It takes multiple episodes to
gain insight into who the bugs are
going after and how they go about
targeting their victims. What we
don’t know is the reason behind
their attacks and the true effect on
their victims. (What does losing
their brains do to them? How do
they still think without them?) It’s
hard to hone in on what the show
means and what it wants to say
without clarity here. It’s one thing
to let a story breathe, it’s another to
completely confuse your audience.

Though, the series still has

some elements which draw me in
despite some of its more confusing
elements. Like “The Good Wife,”
“BrainDead”
features
a
deep

ensemble of New York actors who
bring their characters to life with
a sense of charm and charisma.
Winstead and Tveit especially
have fantastic chemistry, as scenes
where the two share the screen
crackle (and provide the show’s
few laughs). The drama also fea-
tures a similar slickness and pro-
duction value that made “The
Good Wife” so entertaining. You
can see the Kings’ influence on the
direction, camerawork and the
score, all of which help me main-
tain a passive interest in watching
their show.

I wish the Kings took a step

back while planning “BrainDead”
and took more time to adequately
arc out their story. They intro-
duced too little of their main idea
in the first two hours, leading to a
jumble of a story arc. Still, Win-
stead and Tveit’s chemistry and
the production values are going to
be enough for me to keep tuning
in for the rest of the drama’s short
season.

B-

BrainDead

Series Premiere

Mondays at 10 p.m.

CBS

CBS

When will this guy’s brain explode from the pain of politics?

B-

New England

Desiigner

GOOD Music

TV REVIEW