Since Awful Records boss Father dropped the subtle, yet supremely catchy “Look At Wrist” last summer, him and his label have quietly exploded in clubs and on blogs. The record featured other ATLiens Key! and iLoveMakonnen and the latter eventually found the radio with a similarly calm jingle about Tuesdays last fall. It’s inviting to view “Look At Wrist” as a precursor to iLoveMakonnen blowing up. If nothing else, Drake giving iLoveMakonnen his co-sign again proves the Canadian superstar’s worthiness of the proverbial aux cord and establishes a paper trail for those seeking to establishing “Look At Wrist”‘s importance among last year’s club hits. Disregarding Drake’s status as a de facto A&R, the Awful Records camp has made good on the attention paid to their camp by releasing music strong enough to live up to the coverage they have been afforded to this point, even if it is just Father that has commanded even a modicum of attention.
In the wake of last winter’s cheerleading and meet-the-crew feature stories, Awful Records’ heavy hitters have proven good at striking while the iron is hot. Father’s second-in-command Ethereal released the hazy jungle/drum-and-bass reliant Heat Death 2 and Father himself is back, just six months after the release of Young Hot Ebony, with Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First?, described on Father’s SoundCloud page as “32-mins of pure, unfiltered debauchery.” It’s an unambitious mission statement that fails to tell the entire story of one of the strongest rap releases in a month full of big names and a considerable amount of acclaim being tossed around.
For starters, there are nods and winks all over Father’s music. There was the “never whipped a brick/but I get the gist” line from “Look At Wrist” that could play into the notion of trap music’s fans being completely removed from that setting, equating any type of work put in to the glamor of relentless drug trafficking. Surely, it’s a claim Father is applying to himself, one that he has the guts to verbalize.
While a wry writer’s voice from Father can come in “blink-and-you-miss-it” doses, his aesthetic remains unpretentious. If the fun is had at the expense of anyone, it is the high-strung, addressed by Richposlim on “BET Uncut” (“I say she’s sexually liberated/you call her ass a ho”), simultaneously Eurostepping the “good girl” nonsense we left in 2013 and playing the ancient “U Mad Bro” card. It’s fitting on a millennial album that remembers “BET Uncut” enough to properly use it in context and make J-Kwon’s calling card, “Tipsy“, the template for what may wind up being the album’s biggest hit (“Everybody In The Club’s Getting Shot”), while invoking Lil B (“Read Her Lips”) and using “IRL” in a sentence (Abra on “Gurl”).
Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First? yields no massive tweaks to Father’s formula, but rather improves on its predecessor by simply adding four minutes and spreading the album’s strengths rather equally throughout its duration. It’s a reprise of his role of the fun-loving everyman from Young Hot Ebony, but this is Atlanta and 2015, so this not the material found on Murs or Little Brother’s output of roughly a decade ago. No, aside from living up to whatever “Weird Atlanta” billing this release will certainly be slapped with, this is an everyman that has spent enough time out and about in a major city as a child to successfully execute “boricua, morena” as a hook and enough time killed with friends in that very same youth to know he should treat his inner circle to Zaxby’s amidst Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First?‘s sea of references to the Internet, girls, and television. Father isn’t simply just doing it for the Vine.
Album Rating: 4/5