‘The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit.’

–Arthur Schopenhauer

‘All my favourite singers couldn’t sing’

– David Berman

Critically speaking, Bladee has been hard done by. Pitchfork Magazine did not review his 2016 LP Eversince, considered by most Bladee fans, aka drainers, to be his masterpiece. However, they did review Yung Lean’s Unknown Memory in 2014, and his subsequent albums. This brings up an important dichotomy, and one that drainers discuss frequently: Yung Lean versus Bladee. It would be wrong to see the two as competitors; they have collaborated numerous times to make numerous bangers, ‘Nitevision’, ‘Tokyo Drift’, ‘Highway Patrol’, ‘Hennessey and Sailor Moon’ and ‘Hocus Pocus,’ to name a timeless few. They performed together as recently as the 21st of November at Lean’s ‘Wings of Desire’ show in Brixton, with Bladee and his group Drain Gang opening for Lean, and Bladee joining Lean onstage for ‘Hennessey and Sailor Moon’. Despite their many similarities, the two have different origin stories. Yung Lean belongs to the collective Sad Boys, who consist of Yung Lean, and producers Yung Gud and Yung Sherman, whereas Bladee began his musical career with the collective Gravity Boys, who consist of rapper/singer Ecco2K, rapper Thaiboy Digital, producer Whitearmor, and aforementioned Sad Boys member Yung Sherman.

Rather than waste words on much-discussed topics in the realm of Sad Boys / GTBSG ( ‘Gravity Boys Shield Gang,’ an umbrella term encompassing all members and facets of Bladee’s artistic attack squadron) discourse, I’ll get straight to Bladee. Anyone who’s listened to Lean will know upon hearing Bladee that he is… different. From the 2013-14 era of GTBSG, there is the same unmistakable enchanting and ethereal cloud rap sound, made more compelling by Gud and Sherman’s sheer wizardry in the subtle variation of kick placement within the usual trap drum loops, and the delicate hi-hat smatterings, pleasingly irregular in a way that suggests an ear for drum & bass / jungle. With Bladee, that sound has been put through a more haunting, melancholic matrix than Yung Lean’s music. There’s a reason we didn’t see teenagers rocking bucket hats and black longsleeves with miscellaneous vaporwave graphics, Japanese script and the year 2002 in fealty to Bladee: he has always been less joyful, less willing and less available for the populist meme forum than Lean. You can detect that both lyrically and sonically – as a complete oeuvre, Bladee’s music is bleaker than Lean’s, despite the two sharing producers often.

From here I could follow the arc of the ‘Drain Gang CEO’ aka ‘Drain Gang Legendary Member’ aka ‘Autotune Angel’ from 2013, circa the magisterial ‘Bleach’ (prod. Whitearmor) to the present day, but I must attend to the task at hand: re-evaluating his LP Red Light, that came out this May, on the Stockholm label YEAR0001. The LP was shrouded in critical confusion when, in June, the music critic Anthony Fantano gave it a score of 1/10. ‘This is awful,’ he decried, calling Bladee as ‘Lifeless, tuneless, flavourless and one dimensional as NAV’. Rather than spending this post aggressively disagreeing with Fantano’s opinion, I want to bring some other stuff into the Bladee discussion. Having said that, I’ll quickly speak to his comment on Whitearmor’s production, ‘On a few of the tracks here, the mixing and the mastering is trash’. I don’t really get this. I have no problem with the levels; whatever reverb-ish effect Whitearmor puts over his Spartan synth melodies, making them sound faraway and veiled in fog, suggestions of play and capriciousness only half-hidden behind the murderous bass, is nectar to me; and when the 808s come back in at 1:06 on ‘Obedient’ is the best thing that happened to me all year. Anyway, more useful than ornery complaint is drawing attention to moments where, in his distaste, Fantano actually brings up reasons why I like Bladee.

Fantano says Red Light is full of ‘vocal and melodic blemishes’ – that Bladee is ‘beyond the help autotune can provide’. Anyone who has listened to more than three Bladee songs will know that his sound comes from a particular use of autotune as instrument. Here, I would direct Fantano to the critic Mark Fisher, who credits Kanye West’s 2008 LP 808s and Heartbreak with the dominance of autotune over RnB and Hip-Hop from the late 00s onwards. He writes:

Auto-tune is in many ways the sonic equivalent of digital airbrushing, and the (over)use of the two technologies (alongside the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery) result in a look and feel that is hyperbolically enhanced rather than conspicuously artificial. If anything is the signature of 21st century consumer culture, it is this feeling of a digitally upgraded normality – a perverse yet ultra-banal normality, from which all flaws have been erased. […] On 808s and Heartbreak, we hear the sobs in the heart of the 21st century pleasuredome. Kanye’s lachrymose android schtick reaches its maudlin depths on the astonishing ‘Pinocchio Story’. This is the kind of auto-tuned lament you might expect neo-Pinocchio and android-Oedipus David from Spielberg’s AI (2001) to sign; a little like Britney Spears’s ‘Piece of Me,’ you can either hear this as the moment when a commodity achieves self-consciousness, or when a human realizes he or she has become a commodity. It’s the soured sound at the end of the rainbow, an electro as desolated as Suicide’s infernal synth-opera ‘Frankie Teardrop’. (Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Zero Books, 2014, p174.)

I wonder if it amused Fisher that ‘Pinocchio Story’ was a one-off performed live in Singapore City, one of the most commercial and commodity-motivated places on earth. Anyway, I think Fisher’s is the most productive and interesting angle from which to approach Bladee’s autotune.

Fisher’s idea of autotune is the idea that makes Bladee’s music coherent, and it amazes me that more people don’t hear the music in this way. Take ‘Decay,’ perhaps the best song on Red Light. First of all, you hear Bladee’s tri-syllabic groaning diminuendo about nine seconds in, a plaintive wail in the night, an Old Testament resignation. There is certainly no ‘correction’ here. Then the the tri-syllable returns for the verse: ‘I fell off in the ni-i-ight / Bring back Thaiboy I say it twi-i-ice / Bring myself up to the li-i-ight / Yeah bitch you know I’m hi-i-igh’. Yes, in theory he could ‘sing’ this little flourish ‘correctly,’ but the sound of his voice undergoing digital breakdown is thematically a better choice, i.e. more appropriate for the song, which is about loneliness, despair, pain and giving up / giving in. While Fisher brought up autotune in Kanye West by way of 808s, it might be more exciting to talk about it in Yeezus. Autotune-as-expression was first used to convey anhedonia and hedonistic dissatisfaction, but in Yeezus, it became riotous and explosive. In the tragic refrain of ‘new fad / new stack / new phone,’ West uses autotune as a language with which to own the existential situation that late capitalism brings about; in the tortured shriek before the first chorus of ‘Blood on the Leaves,’ depression turns into bloodcurdling Dionysian mania. To that point, I see autotune in Bladee’s oeuvre as an amalgam of 808s and Yeezus aesthetics, a means of expressing the kind of psychic pain, or ennui, or malaise that only a child reared by internet and endless American media might feel. It’s worth adding that, unlike Kanye, Bladee has essentially no songs without autotune. As such, he does not enter into autotune; that is the sonic form in which we first encounter him. There is no Tetsuo-type transformation, no incident of change; we have only ever known Bladee as a kind of cyborg.

In 2016, Duncan Cooper wrote a piece on Yung Lean for Fader, shortly after his producer, Barron Machat, died in a car accident while on the way to deliver a hard drive to Lean while he was in a mental hospital. He interviewed the producer Yung Gud, who spoke frankly on the culture from which Lean and Bladee’s music sprung. Gud had toured with Lean in America, but remained in Sweden rather than join Lean in Miami while producing Warlord. Gud, who is of mixed-race heritage (relevant with respect to quotation below), has a Fisher-esque sensibility about the GTBSG project:

‘You could have a lot of reasons to be angry at a white rapper… I wouldn’t say we have the same acute responsibility as a white American to step aside. We look at screens and we’re fed with American information, American music on the radio, American games, American everything. It’s so vast and immersive, but it’s also so infuriating what it does to the world… [America is] total anarchy, the worst of the worst and the best of the best,’ (‘especially compared to a small socialist country like Sweden,’ adds Duncan.) ‘As a foreigner, I feel like our approach to grabbing U.S. culture is just a part of making yourself heard, getting your presence felt.’

Lean himself commented on the relationship between his music and American popular culture:

“We come from a very non-materialistic lifestyle,” he says, “and just, you know, anxiety. At 21, people in Sweden will be like, ‘My life is over, and I’ll just work for the rest of my life.’ So once you do get to the U.S. and someone meets you at the airport and gives you money and gives you drugs, we go too crazy.”

In the same way I hear it in Kanye, I hear Bladee’s digital wail as the painful and mournful lamentation of the late capitalist subject. I say ‘painful and mournful’ because the music is both energetic and elegiac – something in it is fighting for life, and something is already dead. (Here my mind goes to cultural critic Susan J. Napier’s idea of the ‘three modes’ in Japanese Anime: the festive, the elegiac, and the apocalyptic. Bladee is never really festive – maybe on ‘Frosty the Snowman’? – but he is regularly elegiac, and often apocalyptic.) This is present lyrically as much as it is atmospherically, and in a way that’s more considered, I think, than Lil Peep or Lil Xan or $uicideboys’ deathful crooning. Look at the first line of ‘Nike Just Do It,’ for example: ‘Heard you say you wanna die, so do I’. The syllabic reduction before the rhyme, ‘so do I,’ is quite funny, actually. It’s offhand, like Woody Allen’s one-liner, ‘I won’t take it personal, I’ll just kill myself.’ In the same song, you have another classic Bladeeism, a dark and cryptic muttering: ‘If I go outside that’d be the perfect ending, if I go out back would that make you happy?’ And who could forget ‘Drinking Drano like it’s Faygo / I’m not tryna build with you go play with lego’? With self-harm having become a near-trope in soundcloud rap at our current moment, at least Bladee moves through that trope with much more zaniness and elasticity than any others going over trap beats and sounding hackneyed and insincere. Lyrically speaking, I’ve always wondered if the fact that English is Bladee’s second language gives him a playful approach to rapping – that is to say, a more oblique way of putting words together. Some of his bars just seem arranged in too quirky a fashion to have come from a native speaker. For example: ‘It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad / Why they copying the swag? I’m your dad’. But maybe this is just me underestimating his lyrical capabilities.

The quirks in Bladee’s lyrics are often humorous, and for this I think he is seldom if ever given credit (a cursory look at his twitter reveals him as a humorist working on a level close to Dril). I think he’s funniest on ‘Golden Boy’, the most elegiac track on Red Light. To begin a track with a sultry whisper, ‘this is drain members only,’ a parody of the bedroom whisper through the headphones of the boyband or RnB sex idol to his teen listeners, is sensible to me only as a comic gesture. And the humor persists in the first lines: ‘bleeding through my Prada shoes like they raw / I’ve always been real with you from the start’. An image of designer shoes as raw meat, followed by the sudden declaration of (assumedly romantic) loyalty and sincerity is a whimsical portrait of materialism; its surreal bathos is very funny. The whole song is peppered with syntactically wobbly Americana:

Coach put me in the game and I’m going hard

I’ma strike the ball, going to the stars

Home run, yeah, I go like 600 yards

They want give me a red card when I hit the mall

That this heap of broken images is athletic in nature is amusing. The idea of Bladee as a jock in a suburban American high school, playing both baseball (‘home run’) and soccer (‘red card’), perhaps even basketball (‘coach put me in’), not to mention the image of ‘hitting the mall,’ is just hilarious. Athleticism has heretofore been totally absent in Bladee’s repertoire. That Fantano and others fail to see irony in Bladee’s lyrics, or his self-presentation, confuses me. Almost every song seems to position itself between total goth sincerity, with lyrics like ‘God damn I wonder why am I alive, / I give myself up to the red light’, and total goofiness, like ‘Four five rings on like a mason, / Feeling like I’m Jordan, three points yeah I’m scoring.’ The songs work as a never-ending sequence of unusual, eclectic, and morose visions. Revisiting here for a second T.S. Eliot’s definition of the objective correlative: ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion [which the poet seeks to evoke].’ I include Eliot not as a cheap yanking-up of Bladee’s cultural market price, but hopefully to make more cohesive and entertaining the stream of lyrics, which are always connected by a mood, an atmosphere and a tone that I find unique, and fun to listen to. I’ll conclude the discussion of ‘Golden Boy’ with a few more lyrics:

I see light blue but sometimes it’s pink too

I can be your fog you’ll be my queen like it’s England

I’m just tryna kick it, trust me like religion

Find out what’s your shape and then I’m shifting

Toxic waste, I’m glitching, trapped in my own prison

I can’t live without you like nutrition […]

Beat the evil like a hole-in-one

You make me feel like the golden one

‘Be my queen like it’s England’ is amusing insofar as England, in the context, is an unorthodox association to pair with ‘queen’; and ‘Toxic waste, I’m glitching, trapped in my own prison’ has a pre-millenial Y2K menace to it which is funny in the same way Keanu Reeves’s confused attitude in The Matrix is funny, or a barely-post-dot-com-boom chicken shop you find on some English high streets called, like, ‘chicken dot com,’ is funny. It’s mischievously anachronistic. And mischievous anachronism was how we were introduced to the Sad Boys; it was from Ginseng Strip, a song fixed upon by both the New Yorker and the New York Times in their 2014 articles on Lean, that we heard maybe the most-quoted Lean lyrics:

Poppin’ pills like zits

While someone vomits on your mosquito tits

Slitting wrists while dark evil spirits like Slytherin

Slither in with tricks

I’m not calling the initial simile above a metaphysical conceit, but it certainly shows that a sixteen year old kid, who was soon citing beat poets as an influence in interviews, had some lyrical chops, as well as a postmodern willingness to take freely and broadly from the stale pick n’ mix of late 90s and early 2000s pop culture.

While I do think Bladee’s selection of metaphors and similes is broad and entertainingly eclectic, I don’t think it’s without curation. In fact, there is remarkable thematic clarity. It is essentially a combination of classic hip-hop braggadocio in the disconsolate mode – I have money and designer clothes, but I don’t appear particularly enthused about it, etc – combined with ghostly, folkloric, vaguely Nordic apparitions. I am referring here to lyrics like ‘Reach in the well for a necklace / When the moon is crescent,’ from ‘1D’; and ‘I can feel the static, good dog, catch the rabbit / Money, I’m an addict, ghost in the attic’ from ‘Fake News’; and ‘I put a hex on your mind, you put a bless on my line / You’re my river, liquid and silver’ from ‘Hex,’ a track whose title (along with ‘puppet master’) evokes exactly the eldritch themes I am harping on about here. This isn’t confined to Red Light either; two of the earliest tracks he ever made, under the moniker Evil Bladee, are called ‘Tofu Golem’ and ‘Magical Emperor Sacred Ricefield’. The distinction between this arch mode, and his other weed-smoking materialistic self, generates a particular irony and atmosphere that has no comparison in contemporary music, popular or otherwise. This sonic world is also complemented by the occasional line which is just totally surreal and absurd – the kind of, well, poetry, for which Bladee is so beloved by his fans. I’m hard pressed to find anything as uniquely gothic and goofy as a lyric like ‘Might sleep in a coffin, but I wake up, might be drinking coffee’, or ‘Broken glass in my hands, you could sell me anything,’ or ‘Step on you like vermin, Drain World, we renounce you / Bitch we purging, Imma be a born again virgin’. I have to stray from Red Light to offer one more indomitable bar, from Working on Dying’s ‘Knightsbridge’: ‘Take the good things with the rat poison / I fake the whole thing to get in, I’m a Trojan. One comparison I can think of is Young Thug, but his spontaneity and surrealism eschews continuity, where Bladee prefers to progress within the cursed maudlin milieu he has been creating since 2013.

When you start to place Bladee within his contemporary musical context, he has a certain wholesomeness. Yes, there’s basically incessant drug use (‘put a pill in a mcflurry, I’m goofy’), but absent is the blasé misogyny that so often comes with commercial rap releases. In fact, Red Light lacks a sex drive, as does most of Bladee’s music. Unlike Madonna’s song of the same name, Bladee’s ‘Like a Virgin’ only invokes a pre-carnal state to mourn its loss (again, elegiac); like the Hamlet of Act III Scene i, he displays a total neurosis about flesh on ‘Who Goes There’ – ‘no touching, I find it disgusting’; and on ‘GTBlessgo’ he lulls, ‘I have taught myself how to suppress my urges’[1]. The absence of libidinal propulsion on Red Light, combined with the melancholia that suffuses any material boasts, suggests an awareness of the trappings that come with success in music – sex, drugs, rock and roll – and a movement away from them. Not so much a grandiose Schopenhauerian overcoming of the Will, not a vertical movement but a lateral one; self-enforced exile (‘I went too hard, I wanna be exiled,’ laments Bladee on the 2018 EP Exile), with occasional participation in the world he’s forsaken. Or maybe, as with most depressives, Bladee’s libido is dead in the water because his ego, the part of him that’s meant to be enjoying the capital his music has generated, has eaten away at itself, leaving no energy left for external attachments.

I concede whole-heartedly that my stake in Red Light is deeply personal, and such my defense may lack a ‘cold critical eye’. My friend Ben recently shared an anecdote with me that I’ve been thinking about a lot, and seems relevant here. He saw a friend, let’s call him James, who he hadn’t caught up with for a while at a party, and went up to talk to him. They made the procedural small talk that catching up entails, until Ben asked James,

‘How are you doing though, man? Is everything okay?’

Ben asked it in such a way, with enough deliberateness, to make it clear that he was happy and willing to receive a longer, more honest response, should his friend wish to articulate one.

‘I’ve actually been having a really hard time at the moment man. Thanks for asking.’

James proceeded to talk about his own mental health, with Ben listening to him, and finally offering whatever advice or support he felt he could give at that moment. At the end of the conversation, James asked Ben how, if at all, he knew that something was up.

‘Well, I saw on Spotify that you’d been listening to a lot of Lil Peep.’

I’m not bringing this up to suggest that everyone who listens to Lil Peep is depressed, or that our music taste has an exact correlation to our mental health, I’m just observing the emotional currency that music can have, and how immediately it may refer to our lives. For example, I felt compelled to write over 3000 words on Bladee because some people on the internet don’t share my favourable opinion of his music. For most of my junior year and all of my senior year in college, I was listening to Bladee incessantly. I would put on my headphones, and not so much walk from place to place, as crawl along sullenly, my face to the ground, as though cruising slowly around the streets of New Haven on the hoverboard of my own despair. Along with the Tandoor restaurant on Chapel Street’s lunch buffet, Red Light was a gift from the heavens, or indeed the underworld, and making it to graduation without that album, and Eversince, on repeat is unimaginable to me. As such, I’ll undergo myriad critical gymnastics to vindicate Red Light, or attempt to translate my unbounded personal affection for the album into something that might be comprehensible to other listeners, or something that might persuade skeptics and detractors. I think there’s more to be done: if I had more of a technical understanding, I would talk more extensively on Whitearmor’s production, including 2018 releases beyond Red Light, like ‘Trial,’ the destructive track from Exile, or D33J’s understated track 10K Froze. I haven’t delved into Ecco2K’s involvement in the Bladee oeuvre, and the ways in which he diverges and converges with the Drain Gang CEO, nor have I discussed the warrish and brazen Thaiboy Digital, who whilst absent on Red Light is of course forever woven into the fabric of Drain Gang. As I was finishing up this post, I saw that Bladee had just dropped a 19 track mixtape, ICEDANCER. Maybe I’ll go into the above topics after the critics divulge their opinion on the new mixtape. Unless they give it good reviews, in which case I will probably just bump Bladee, feeling in some small way that my work as a loyal drain footsoldier, one who pledges never-ending allegiance to the drain,[2] is done. Epic…

[1] Incidentally, from the same verse: ‘self hatred because I need to be perfect.’ Compare with Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: ‘What appears in a minority of individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can be understood easily as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.’ (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle trans. Strachey, Norton, p50.)

[2] The language of militarism is all too prominent in Bladee fandoms. If you find this as amusing as I do, I invite you to check out either the comments section on any of Bladee’s youtube videos (or the comments on Fantano’s Red Light review), the Facebook group ‘DRAINGANG SADPOSTING’ – my favourite thing about Facebook – or the god-tier shitpost event description for the YEAR0001 2018/2019 New Year’s Eve party (http://nyevian0001.com/?fbclid=IwAR2OgnLDgFOwk2KhUknBfBBz3gULPzhkJi9yTCG_80XaQXDqVR3gLeSQBs0) which, to say the absolute utmost least, deserves a post of its own.