Sound Advice: Three weirdos of rap

“I’m every single thing you think of me/ I’m sinner, killer, drug dealer, refugee.” That’s Tunde Olaniran’s précis of the age-old identity crisis of the “Brown Boy.” On his new EP, Yung Archetype (Quite Scientific), Olaniran asserts his rap bona fides and positions trap music as the sonic vanguard of hip-hop.

In it, he hears what Young Thug senses intuitively and exploits to mesmerizing effect: the space hiding in plain sight within the deceptive simplicity, or even the primitiveness of trap. Thugger fills that space with a style of rap that borders on alchemy. On his best songs (try starting with “Danny Glover” or “The Blanguage”) he’s an anti-songwriter, turning tracks into a Dalian memory of song craft — melting hooks, an array of vocal ticks and deliveries (codeine drawl singing, sing rapping, speed up/slow down/speed back up, vertigo-inducing yo-yo rapping) into unpredictable shapes. Snapping in and out of flows as if he were hearing several beats in his head at the same time, Young Thug has never met a cadence he couldn’t manhandle, a fleeting thought he couldn’t maneuver into rhyme, a rule of the game he gave a fuck about. In this company, it’s the openly gay former dance student Le1f’s ebullient but confrontational “pretty nigga” manifesto Hey that sounds almost conventional as alt-rap goes.

As personas, the three seem conjured from the nightmares of Cliff Huxtable or 50 Cent. All three have an interest in androgyny, all three discard received ideas of black masculinity, either street or aspirationally straitlaced. But hip-hop has long established itself as the vessel by which ideas of black cool, eccentricity and brilliance are transported into the mainstream (and in fact become the mainstream), and as the turf where those ideas contend, combine and regenerate each other. These outsiders are exactly where they belong.