Lil Uzi Vert: Pink Tape review — an exhausting litany of sexist jokes and brags

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We have ample opportunity over the long duration of Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape to reflect on the truism that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

First, the changes. In many ways, the Philadelphia rapper represents newness in its most extreme form. Like a character in an implausibly zeitgeisty novel, Uzi (pronouns: they/them) has had a 10-carat pink diamond reportedly worth $24mn inserted into their forehead. “Might put some diamonds [on] my nose,” they rap on their new album, whose 26 tracks have all entered Spotify US’s top 100. It’s set to be the first rap album to top the Billboard album chart this year.

The music is a post-genre mash-up of trap beats, hyperpop, emo and thrash metal. Names of designer drugs and designer clothes litter the verses. Uzi is so far ahead of the curve that they make standard-issue celebrity excess sound old hat. “I’m so rock star I might try cocaine,” they rap in “Suicide Doors”. In the same song, they describe themself as “reptilian” and “not normal”. “My mama don’t know me no more ’cause I got new blood,” they wisecrack.

Students of outlandish conspiracy theories will recognise a reference here to the zany idea that famous people are really shape-shifting extraterrestrial lizards intent on controlling the human race. With their eccentric outfits and body modifications, Uzi embodies this fantasy of alien plutocracy to such an overdriven degree as to seem to be satirising it. The Trumpian dragon energy coursing parodically through the project is detected by the acute antennas of Nicki Minaj, guesting on one of the best tracks, “Endless Fashion”. “I got a Republican doctor,” she choruses. “Made my ass great again, MAGA.”

The album lasts almost 90 minutes. It exists in a post-criticism dimension in which usual notions of good and bad cease to apply. There are intense beats that make nothing else seem to matter (“Fire Alarm”) and lulls when a song title is repeated no fewer than 38 times (“Crush Em”). The lack of regard for standard quality control is almost admirable — but then we come to the reason why things stay the same with Pink Tape.

Uzi’s opening words are to boast of having sex with eight women a day, in repudiation of rumours about their sexuality. “How could you ever say Lil Uzi gay?” they add. This locker-room machismo continues throughout the album, an exhausting litany of sexist jokes and brags, like a trap-pop version of Porky’s or Animal House. Do the teenage boys who make up a good portion of the rap market really have unchanging appetites? For all its unconventionality, Pink Tape behaves as though they do.

★★☆☆☆

‘Pink Tape’ is released by Generation Now/Atlantic