Lucki is a rapper who doesn’t give a damn about industry games, something he’s forthright about on the opener of Freewave 3: “They fuck with me off strength, fuck the politics.” Much like his good friend Earl Sweatshirt (who has a production credit here on “All In,” which sounds like a lo-fi B-Side from last year’s Some Rap Songs), Lucki uses his music as a form of confessional healing, a mode of songwriting that pays little concern to indulging trends or trying to shoehorn in some major feature. Freewave 3 is 30 sobering minutes of a Chicago MC exorcising his most distressing demons: his breakup with his long-term girlfriend (“Of Course You Won’t”), vices that consume his life (“Out My Way”), and his estranged relationship with his mother that’s been the result of his codeine addiction (“Peach Dream”).
These songs are presented in the most straight-to-the-point way imaginable, mumbled for a maximum ‘feel my pain’ effect, and usually lasting about two minutes in length; it’s sorta like Future’s hedonistic material, except meant for people who want no enjoyability in their rap music. There’s no real moralizing here, which instills a relatively gritty quality in Freewave 3’s lyrics, one where our supposed hero’s antics are never outright condemned, even as he continues to fall into his old addictions. It’s this same quality which also can make the project feel pretty one-note, though; there’s no sense of progression for the narrative here. Though, again, it could be said that that’s part of Freewave 3’s appeal, this tendency toward very human mistakes that continue to be repeated in a way which accurately reflects the harsh reality of substance abuse. With that frame, Lucki’s certainly attempting something admirable here, despite however tediously invariant the final product can seem.
Published as part of What Would Meek Do? | Issue 7
