Luv Is Rage

Luv Is Rage

Before he was a global superstar—before minor changes to his wardrobe would set the agendas for fashion editors and streetwear resellers, before the personnel decisions he made on albums could make or break careers—Lil Uzi Vert already had supreme trust in his instincts. His debut mixtape from 2015, Luv Is Rage, is a testament to this confidence, an intuitive survey of everything that was bubbling up in rap production at that moment, and what was to come. Much of Luv Is Rage sounds hot, as if the speaker system in a crowded nightclub is about to fry itself from the sheer intensity of a set. Listen to the way “Safe House,” “Banned From TV,” or “Belly” cut through the mix, serrated and sweaty. On the nearly hallucinatory “Yamborghini Dream,” Uzi trades careening verses with Young Thug, two of rap’s great eccentrics feeding off one another’s unpredictability. Though Uzi had yet to fold in the literal elements of rock music that augmented his later work, this opening salvo is full of the rockstar ethos that would come to define him, all fearless experimentation staked on a belief in his own charisma. Despite this willingness to push himself to extremes of tempo and intensity, Uzi is often at his most magnetic when he allows himself a more languid pace and finds more negative space in which to operate. Playful though it is, the patient “Top” carries with it an air of curiosity that would be swept away in a more raucous, club-oriented format; “Ballin” achieves a sort of meditative peace that essentially recontextualizes the mixtape’s hedonist bent. The transcendent moments—the ones that presage the dominance to come—find Uzi making his voice inextricable from the track, as on “All My Chains,” where he and the drums seem to be in perfect concert. It’s the type of clarity usually years in the making.

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