Desiigner — Panda

Panda. Panda. Then it's all dark in the fog, all the way to glory: out of nowhere, he's at the top of the Hot 100. With this banger for clubs, dirty alleys and trap houses all over the world, at 18, Desiigner allows himself to snatch several achievements within the complicated music industry: he's the youngest guy to top the chart since Lorde, he brings the US back to the top after nearly a year of foreign domination, and he's the closest thing to a rapper getting back in front of everyone after two years.

This latest record allows him to become the first New York rapper to top the chart since 2009 (Jay-Z ft. Alicia Keys, with "Empire State of Mind") and the first New York rapper to lead solo since 2003, when 50 Cent released "In Da Club". Five platinum discs certified by the RIAA, over 1.5 million copies sold, the piece is a global hit and also goes strong in Oceania and Europe, diamond disc in France.

The song is based on an instrumental by the British beatmaker Menace, discovered by a friend of the trapper and paid $200, while Sidney "Desiigner" Selby III is playing "GTA V", from which he'll take inspiration for the song itself. Desiigner releases it in mid-December 2015 and the song gets considerable hype on Soundcloud, but he's doomed to die there, probably: Kanye West picks it up and samples it for "Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 2" from his album "The Life of Pablo". The hype grows and the young man, who in the days before the release of Kanye's LP, signed with his GOOD Music, decides to re-release the single, the results arrive: aided by dab, catchy rhythm and a commercial and incomprehensible rapping style, "Panda" quickly and easily climbs the leaderboard to the top spot, surprisingly.

Music critics don't understand what's behind the sudden success of this unknown guy, especially British magazines: will the new hope of rap manage to settle permanently in the industry? What will be the next hit of the future star of the genre? How will this flag move the new sound of New York rap? In fact, these questions hide another implicit one, which everyone is asking: how come an unknown dude who came out of nowhere, in a few months managed to do what Future still hasn't been able to do after years? The answer is easier than expected, this is one of the typical strokes of luck of the amateur that succeed only once in a lifetime: wow, that was... it wasn't obvious to say this guy was going to be another random one-hit wonder, but in retrospect, that was to be expected.

«Sounds more like Future than Future sounds like Future» (LogicalBones)

It's necessary to take a few steps back and go back to the Future, from which the boy copies the style entirely, without denying it. Future, alone, has changed the trap subgenre, innovating it with an easily imitable style and generating dozens of clones ready to replicate him, with the risk that, as in this case, they manage to steal the commercial success he aspires to: up to that moment, his most successful single is "Jumpman", number 12 in the pop chart featuring Drake, in addition, Future has three singles on the chart, while Desiigner celebrates the primacy simply by copying him, without inventiveness, with a rhythm found on youtube by an amateur and without a real lyrics, it's all very casual. If I take a single from Future at random, "F Up Some Commas" is twenty times better than whatever this song is, but it's twenty times commercially inferior, and that fact is legitimately inexplicable. The Atlanta trapper has been in the rap game for several years and has consecrated himself in the industry with five albums including a collaborative one with Drake, he doesn't even care about Desiigner, who will soon return to oblivion.

The production of the song is solid: if you take the instrumental, you find that Menace did a nice job and created a simple and solid panorama, with tight and heavy but livable drums, resulting in a dirty and dark sound. This led to the creation of several freestyles by many other rappers. Nonetheless, Desiigner hardly seems to care about the rhythm, and he decides to use it in a curious and extravagant way. He starts with a casual adlib that feels momentary, and instead is meant to stay the whole track, mixed over the young man's performance: "PPRRRAAAAA", you guess the "panna" is actually the title and that he "got" something "in Atlanta", then nothing is understood for three minutes. This kid spits things out in a style that is all too similar to that of the more well-known Future and he distorts English in an incomprehensible way to the point that he almost creates his own language, joke at the base of the title of his debut mixtape. It's in these cases that I bless the existence of Genius: the funny part is that no one understood what Desiigner spat out, so it's the trapper's job to get to the site to explain what the lyrics are. In an attempt to clarifying one of the passages, he takes the liberty of saying «I can't even explain»: he doesn't even know what he wrote and said, he just lined up random words that don't make sense. The track, in summary, is this: bridge, hook, bridge, hook, bridge, hook, bridge. In this order. There is no verse. Brilliant. There is not even a lyrics, this guy says "panna" 39 times and little else, failing to concretize the success of the hit: instead of selling an album, he puts out a mixtape ignored by critics, instead of taking part in as many records as possible, he introduces himself as a guest on five official albums of unknown dudes over the next five years. Even GOOD Music released him, after realizing late that, like many OHWs before him, in the industry the boy would have no Future.

1/5