They have similar laid back ideologies but there’s a noticeable disparity in the presentation. “The vision for us was quite clear/When the smoke clears decades later we’ll still be here,” he spits, summing up the Jet Life mythos. Curren$y, on the other hand, is still capable of rapping something so simple it’ll make you wonder how no one has rapped it already. He presents all of his ideas in the most primitive ways.
Wiz’s easy-bake flows couldn’t be more formulaic.Īt this point, it feels like every line out of Wiz’s mouth is something he’s rapped before. Curren$y slithers through verses, perpetually spontaneous. Wiz enunciates each syllable distinctly and sticks rigidly to cadences. Curren$y is a marble-mouthed spitter who bends flows so dramatically they can seem out of time. They have little in common beyond a love of weed and women, lounging around and cruising in foreign whips. Even when Wiz signed his Atlantic deal, this partnership still seemed to ground him.īut Wiz and Curren$y are an odd couple. They’d taken opposing trajectories to wind up in the same place-the origin story of most great buddy cop movies-and as a tag-team, they felt refreshingly outside of the grinding gears of mainstream machinery. One was a major-label prospect who’d escaped an unflattering situation to become a prolific artist the other was a major-label hopeful earnestly producing DIY mixtapes and maximizing a fledgling online economy. They interpolated OutKast, presenting themselves as the zonked-out second coming of the two dope boyz. Listening to How Fly and Live in Concert now, it’s easy to see why it worked before. There are glimpses of the easygoing, unruffled, and effortlessly cool rap produced in the apartment on the tape’s cover, but it’s diminishing returns.
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And they want their credit: “One of the originals who showed you fools how to turn the internet rhymes into residuals,” Curren$y raps on a song called, well, “Stoned Gentleman.” They are very clearly trying to replicate something here, working with producers from their shared pasts (Cardo, Sledgren, MonstaBeatz) in search of the fleeting high that is nostalgia.
After an unofficial reunion in 2013 on the stopgap EP Live in Concert and years of teasing How Fly 2, the duo has finally released a proper sequel to their high-times epic. That’s kind of the point of 2009, a mixtape that has been at least four years in the making: Despite a seismic shift in the world and music industry, they’re still the same guys, only richer, making the same songs. These days, the rap duo swaps in Nintendo Switches and Instagram, but in the decade since teaming up, almost nothing has changed about them. There’s a bar on How Fly about playing Nintendo Wii while using the now-defunct iChat.
It’s a tape almost displaced from its time-buried by commercially successful artistic failures from legacy rappers (JAY-Z, Eminem, 50 Cent) and pivotal moments of ascension for their successors (Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Kanye West)-yet also almost entirely of it. NahRight posts were the coin of the realm and going double-platinum on the mixtape database DatPiff was a valuable metric. Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y’s 2009 mixtape How Fly-blog era rap’s own Watch the Throne-was a transitional and somewhat ephemeral moment.
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