Future tends not to work well with others. The Atlanta rap workhorse has proven he can produce a well structured posse cut, at least with the right team in place (“Move That Dope” still being the best example), but there’s just generally been no one else who can match Future Hendrix’s drugged-out, misanthropic worldview. Even still, Future has released no less than five collaborative mixtapes in the past three years alone. The results have been predictably dire, including the one with Drake where the two artists lazily traded aimless bars with the chemistry of two dudes pissing next to each other, and another with Young Thug, where both tried to out-weird each other and somehow mutually came up short.
What makes WRLD on Drugs, Future’s album with rising emo-trap star Juice WRLD, the most successful of his collaborative efforts is that Juice is just about as miserably misogynistic as he is. This means that the two rappers can get right to their dead-eyed point: popping xans, downing enough codeine to make comatose even the heaviest of drinkers, and treating women like shit. “No Issue” has a minimalist Wheezy beat, and brags like “make her cry, cry, cry, she need tissue / I get high, high, high, and have no issue” — with neither Future nor Juice showing an iota of remorse. When the pace kicks up, as on the menacing “Red Bentley,” Future’s Southern drawl-dripping triplet-flow carefully enunciates every word, endearing us to each of his insane boasts. Juice doesn’t slack either, somehow even out-stunting Future in a callback to “Real Sisters” (“fuck twins, I need triplets”). WRLD on Drugs is lean, mean, and of course it’s sexist as hell—which is par for the course for any Future release these days.
Published as part of What Would Meek Do? | Issue 4
