Chuckyy photo by Tlaw.
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Chuckyy has an ear for desolate beats that shudder and ripple even in the absence of percussion. At his quietest there are still muffled imprints of 808s and glitching snares, but the way the 19-year-old Chicago rapper’s congested run-on flows fill every crack and crevice in his sparse instrumentals inverts the typical rhythmic hierarchy of a rap song: his bars are metronomic and the drums are practically decorative rather than foundational.
This week’s I Live, I Die, I Live Again sports a few denser tracks (like the single “We Got Buttons” and LUCKI torchpass “Hotseat”) but largely leans on Chuckyy’s hypnotic verses, whether he’s ripping into pizzicato strings (“Hiccup”) or wonky jerk beats (“Tell It All”). “IDGAF” opens like a funeral dirge, though an early admission that “a n***a be going through shit too” doesn’t spur any thoughtful confessionals. In fact, Chuckyy seems more perturbed by misaligned wheels on his Trackhawk than gun violence – you’d think he was starring in Wanted (2008) the way bullets always curve towards the opps.
Beneath the gratuitous violence and his deadpan nihilism, Chuckky’s intricate rhymes pack syllables together like so many fans at the barricade, tracing an unwieldy path through run-ons like, “Winter time I tote thirties summertime come with my drum” and “you lost five guys I wish you would stop woofin, defense that’s a must.” The closest he gets to cracking a smile is when he sneers, “they can’t go hat for hat or rack for rack, these tough ass bums,” sounding like he just picked a speck of lint off his new pants.
