Rap has always favored the young, but never more so than in 2017, where the genre’s entire distribution model is tilted toward internet-savvy artists on the vanguard of social and musical trends. Along with fellow Miami native and frequent collaborator Smokepurpp, 17-year-old Lil Pump is part of a surge of SoundCloud rappers so intuitively aware of what plays online that, knowingly or not, they’ve essentially Moneyballed rap music, racking up tens of millions of streams with no-budget songs they’ve barely even bothered to master. Major labels used to spend small fortunes to achieve that kind of reach. Lil Pump doesn’t even need a real microphone.
In truth, even the most well-financed A&R team could only dream about creating a rapper as shareable as Pump, who at first glance can seem less like a real artist than a computer’s too-perfect aggregation of what rap looks and sounds like at this precise moment. He’s got Lil Yachty’s sense of flamboyant style and adventurous hair and Lil Uzi Vert’s taste in drugs, designers, and bright, cartoony cover art. His biggest, most blown-out tracks play like the tortured last gasps of an imploded subwoofer. And, in an evergreen angle that’s always catnip for the media, he carries an air of punk rebellion. A memorable New York Times profile opens with an account of Pump sparking an all-out brawl after kicking a fan in the head on stage, then instructing a friend to send footage of the scuffle to a hip-hop blogger. A self-marketer to the core, he played the incident for maximum viral reach.
If all that suggests a certain cynicism, it’s to Pump’s credit that none of it comes through in his music. There isn’t a moment on his brisk self-titled debut album where he doesn’t sound completely, endearingly stoked, and that kind of total commitment is all too rare on any rap album, mumble or otherwise. Where Uzi and Yachty tend to check out of their lesser material, Pump doubles down on every song, injecting SremmLife-levels of enthusiasm into even the rare ones that fall short of their goal of rattling around in listeners’ heads for hours after just a few exposures. Every track is loud, hyper, and catchy just to the brink of obnoxiousness, with only a couple crossing that threshold by a step or two.
Chief Keef is ostensibly the model for Pump’s economical, catchphrase-heavy style of rapping, and Pump has cited him as an inspiration. Compared to Keef’s tough guest turn on “Whitney,” though, Pump sounds like a kid brother too giddy with mischief to maintain a straight face. The album is filled with moments like that, guest spots from elder statesmen that mostly underscore Pump’s youth. A throwback, Lex Luger-style beat from producer Bighead highlights the generational divide between Pump and a half-present Gucci Mane on “Youngest Flexer,” while Rick Ross has never sounded more like a wooly mammoth succumbing to the tar pit than he does cast against Pump’s boyish patter on “Pinky Ring.”
As the first extended exposure to an artist previously heard only in brief fits, Lil Pump’s debut is impressively consistent, a sign that the divisive rapper may have more staying power than his many detractors have predicted. But even at a trim 36 minutes, the album does hint at some of the traps Pump could fall into if he runs out of ways to keep his routine fresh. Like Lil Uzi Vert or Mac Miller, whose voice Pump’s recalls during some of the album’s lazier hooks, Pump sometimes defaults to sickly simple melodies. The album’s two outright duds, “Foreign” and “Iced Out,” tell a stark cautionary tale: If you scale back Pump’s modernist trappings, buff away his signature distortion, and tame his jumpy energy, you’re basically left with Wiz Khalifa, and the world really doesn’t need another one of those.
While nobody would mistake him as one of rap’s great thinkers, Pump isn’t nearly the meritless insult to hip-hop that his grumpiest critics have cast him as. Compared to some of his SoundCloud peers, his album is almost downright traditionalist—it’s certainly not as audacious as Playboi Carti’s own self-titled debut, a perpetual motion fidget spinner of an album that regarded rap as entirely optional. That record was, in its own way, an art piece, but Pump couldn’t care less about art. Even his distortion isn’t artful in any meaningful way; it’s just a signifier of volume and excitement. Lil Pump’s one and only concern is turning up and he can do it with the best of them.
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