WSH's Songs of the Year 2018

January 1, 2019 Larry J. Sanders

20. “Yernin” • Sevyn Streeter (single-only release)

19. “Communication (feat. DRAM)” • Arin Ray (Platinum Fire)

18. “Move the Bag" • Earlly Mac (Big MF)

17. “Window Pain (Outro)” • J. Cole (KOD)

16. “God is a woman” • Ariana Grande (Sweetener)

15. “Slay (feat. Quavo)” • YG (Stay Dangerous)

14. “Barack Obama Special” • Bas (Milky Way)

13. “Come Together” • The Internet (Hive Mind)

12. “No Underbossin’” • Willie Mac Jr. (Inc University: Back to Cool)

11. “Smile (Living My Best Life) (feat. Snoop Dogg + Ball Greezy)” • Lil Duval (single-only release)

I regularly talk with my brother Donovan about my decreasing understanding of rhythm & blues as a genre. I feel massively behind-the-curve, like I’m old or something — I drafted a tweet poking fun at my continued fandom of Trey Songz after he released his most recent mixtapes a few weeks ago, and the punchline was that anyone still excited about a new Trey Songz project in 2018 probably wouldn’t know much about what the kids are listening to nowadays. I’d be willing to bet there’s no Venn diagram where Fans of Trey Songz and, let’s say, Fans of Brent Faiyaz overlap (besides, of course, me and Donovan). I could be wrong, but considering I once considered myself an R&B connoisseur, there is no doubt 14-year-old me — or, hell, even 21-year-old me — would be disappointed in how rap-centric my music consumption has gradually become this decade. In my defense though, most of these singers rap too! I hate these blurred lines, truly.

Where does someone like 6LACK fall in this modern R&B landscape? Donovan says he’s more rapper than singer, which I guess is technically true; born Ricardo Valdez Valentine (which, randomly, is an awesome R&B name on its own), he fell in love with battle-rapping while in middle school and apparently got quite good at the artform before deciding he wanted to grow as a musician. But by my estimation, that growth produced arguably the best rhythm & blues album of 2018 — and that’s where these genre distinctions stop making any sense to me at all.

I won’t go so far as to call East Atlanta Love Letter an instant classic (let’s be better about that verbiage moving into 2019 guys, seriously), but I do believe it is one of this year’s musical achievements, an album detailing the all-too-relatable theme of balancing love with success and figuring out what to do once seemingly forced to choose just one. My favorite R&B historically has been the stories of groveling, emotionally vulnerable men — see “I Could Never Love Another” by The Temptations, “Distant Lover” by Marvin, “For You to Love” by Luther, “Liberian Girl” by Michael, “I Cant Let U Go” by Usher, “Mary Go Round” by musiq, and I’ll stop there for the sake of time — and most if not all of East Atlanta Love Letter is 6LACK confessing that he’s not one of these cliché rappers who carry the gimmick into their everyday living; think Future if Nayvadius were actually in on the joke. I mean, 6LACK starts off “Loaded Gun,” the album’s second song, advising his current lady to make love to him like he’s going to leave her, and specifically for their neighbor, before quickly acknowledging that’s not what he really wants to do. But the point remains: he’s famous, successful, and really really rich, and those three factors have this weird tendency to muddy one’s perspective on self-control. With increased success comes increased temptation, and he’s human for contemplating if the grass might could be greener elsewhere. At the same time, he’s not trying to lose his baby girl, the one who stood beside him through the struggle. Is their love strong enough to withstand the bullshit that inevitably comes their way? Er, sounds like an R&B album to me.

No song better encapsulates that tension than “Pretty Little Fears,” 6LACK’s plea for sincere transparency from his partner, aware that level of honesty is the sort of active commitment they’ll have to show each other if they expect their relationship to succeed. Backed by an A+ J. Cole feature (one of his best ever, in my opinion), “Pretty Little Fears” is easily East Atlanta Love Letter’s most poignant moment, these two men nakedly in their feelings about the women for whom they care deeply, asking plainly for their complete and unmitigated trust. That’s heavy. They might not be as good as groveling as David Ruffin or Teddy Riley — or even one Trey Songz — but it’ll do for 2018. Must account for the changing times, I suppose.

I didn’t get hip to Dom Kennedy until around summer 2015, around the time the rumors of his rap demise started to become an actual fear among his day-one fanbase. Here’s the thing though: I myself couldn’t tell the difference between old Dom and the stuff he was putting out at the moment. As a new listener (who, in fact, liked the stuff I’m hearing), I felt torn between giving credence to the opinions of my friends who’d been listening to Dom for years while wondering why, suddenly, they didn’t think the music was good anymore. He changed, I’d often get as a vague response, and so I skipped June 2015’s By Dom Kennedy just because the folks I expected to care about it seemed wholly disinterested. Like, didn’t even want to give it a chance. Truthfully, that seemed a bit drastic for a guy who then, and now, doesn’t really rap about anything.

I don’t write that last sentence pejoratively; to me — seriously — it’s part of Dom’s charm. I’m going to start typing out my favorite stretch of his verse on “The Come Up,” just to see if I can stop it before the verse ends:

So gather round hustlas — that’s if you still livin’

Get more groupie love than Mike Bivins

Y’all n***** gotta play y’all role, Taj Gibson

Shoot the whole video set like Benny Boom

Diamonds dancing all in the light — cash rules

My chick gotta know how to rap, I’m Papoose

I mean, I should just scorch you n*****, Scott Storch you n*****s

Have the yacht ready, real n***** on the come up

Huaraches on my feet brand new, I’m not a runner

Since Ross killed Baby, I’m the #1 stunna

You waiting on me to fall off? Take a number

That’s nearly the entire verse, which is actually what I expected. Except, what’s exceptional about this verse, seriously? It’s made of a bunch of non-sequiturs with minimal if any connection to the line that precedes it, except all those bars are exceptionally clever on their own. The Hov shoutout into the Mike Bivins shoutout into the clever Taj Gibson shoutout INTO THE BENNY BOOM SHOUTOUT; Dom’s oddly like a black pop culture encyclopedia, and just being a cool black dude from Los Angeles is the source material for his raps. This Dom verse is one of my favorite of the year, hands down — that “since Ross killed Baby” bar is immaculate — and it also meanders here, there, and everywhere. But it works! That might be part of the joy of a new Dom verse: just discovering how we get to the end. It’ll probably be an adventure, but you’re guaranteed to be a smarter and doper person once he's finished.

This song is so Cali, buoyed by Dom and L.A. Dreamville signee Cozz (“I must be diseased or halfway ugly / ‘cause these haters talk s*** but look / they don’t never touch me” made me scrunch up my face the first few times I heard it), and Smoke DZA sounds so at home here I didn’t realize he wasn’t from California until I started doing research for this piece. (Sidenote: he’s from New York, which makes his adjustment to this vibe even that much more impressive.) But all in all, “The Come Up” is a Dom Kennedy showcase — a reminder that even if he’s not “better” than your favorite rapper, he’s damn sure cooler.

Days after the Warriors’ relatively anticlimactic sweep of the LeBronnettes in last June’s NBA Finals, HBO and The Ringer produced a visually stunning recap of their four-game series, the show culminating with the Dubs’ championship parade being soundtracked this song right here, which I hadn’t yet heard before. I declared on-the-spot that “Win" would absolutely positively have to be my favorite song of 2018.

Didn’t quite make it to #1 — although #8 on a prestigious list such as this ain’t nothing to sneeze at. (I’m joking. Kinda.) But if you listen to Jay Rock — and specifically Jay Rock — you certainly understand why I leapt to that conclusion.

I’ve waxed poetic a few times on this site about my longstanding affection for MTV Jams (now BET Jams, and I’m eyerolling for obvious reasons here), that channel single-handedly keeping me preoccupied for the bulk of my teenaged TV watching during boring summer days and the doldrums of winter weekends. For a few summers at the end of last decade and the top of this one, the network selected a Fab 5, five artists whose music MTV Jams would highlight over the course of the summer months; think XXL’s Freshman Class for people who still cared entirely too much about the music video as an artform. Somehow there exists no evidence of the Fab 5 lists between 2007 and 2011, but if I remember correctly, Jay Rock was a member of the 2008 cohort, bolstered by an incredible introduction to the mainstream titled “All My Life (In the Ghetto).” (The Lil Wayne feature — at the peak of his powers no less — couldn’t have hurt either.) At that point, I’d never heard of a Top Dawg, of a Black Hippy or an Ab-Soul or a ScHoolboy or a Kendrick Lamar, but I knew that on his own merits Jay Rock would be a star, the Great Compton Hope that would bring West Coast rap back to the fore.

Um, not exactly how things panned out. Rock quickly went from group leader to sort-of an afterthought, lost in the shuffle to his more famous, prolific, universally-loved labelmates. He never went completely away, mind you: his appearance on “Money Trees” off Kendrick’s Good Kid, m.A.A.d City is frequently cited as a scene-stealer (a feat for any guest on any Kendrick project), and he’s had his own intermittent successes in the years since, unfortunately none as huge as Kendrick’s or ScHoolboy Q’s — or sometimes, even Ab-Soul’s.

Yet while Rock’s “Money Trees” verse is undeniably elite and definitely a personal favorite, I’m often drawn to his feature on Kendrick’s “The Heart Pt. 3,” released just days before GKMC. Kendrick spends most of the song detailing his rise to prominence — and TDE’s, by proxy — with Rock and Ab-Soul making surprise, almost random guest turns, co-signing Kendrick’s tale on how hard it’d been for them to even reach that point in 2012. As Kendrick notes, Jay Rock was the first of the four to be signed to a major label, and they too believed he’d be the one from California to pop, solving all of their life problems in the process. Rock’s inability to manifest what I’m sure seemed like a certain success at the time could’ve eaten at him, but he took it in stride, even laughing at his naysayers (and implicitly, his former label) for their lack of faith:

Laughing at you n***** out there who thought we was flukes

Exaggerated s*** we rapped had came true

Thought I was aggravated when Warner had let me loose

I was honored -- see, they was haunted when Mike Jones didn’t recoup

Pithy, brash, defiant — hallmarks of my favorite Jay Rock songs. And now in 2018, “Win” is likely Rock’s tour de force, a no-nonsense instructional that you’d be wise to follow if you want to, er, succeed.

Win -- win, win, win, win!

F*** everything else -- win, win, win, win!

These n***** ain’t s*** -- win, win, win, win!

Stop chasin’ that b**** (STOP!) -- win, win, win, win!

Sounds like a plan to me. Backed by a very, very good horn section and uncredited (hilarious) ad-libs from Kung-Fu Kenny, Jay Rock has, perhaps unwittingly, provided us the secret to his longevity. 10 years later — after being dropped from his label and largely relegated to TDE’s sideline, and involved in a life-threatening motorcycle accident to boot — we now understand Big Johnny as a man of action. Why dwell on the past? That’s not winning behavior.

Slightly tangential — and I don’t know how wise it is to start this piece off with a tangent, but let’s see if I can reel this back in — but have you all seen the cover of the January 2019 Rolling Stone? In case you haven’t, the magazine features rap’s newest megastar Travis Scott, except without the braids that have sort-of represented the rager ethos we’ve come to know him for this decade. Instead, Trav rolled with a flat-ironed look, and not only was it unexpected, but I fully thought it was Young Thug or at least a mash-up of the two until the headline on the cover confirmed that, yes, it was indeed Travis Scott, and just Travis Scott.

I don’t know how neatly I tied that together, but as a fan of theirs who’d decided they’d be making this list weeks ago, I thought that was a cool little nugget, all things considered. Although the two didn’t make the list as a duo last year, the odds are extremely high they’ll make the list together each year as long as they work in tandem, given my predilection toward their work as a unit. 2015’s “Drunk” — the original and not the one with Bieber, which pales in comparison, and you know I’m right — is still one of the most hazily beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, Travis providing the musical soundscape for Thugger to exist as this shape-shifting, ubiquitous presence who can both handle his own verses and the ad-libs on Trav’s. And here’s what I wrote about “pick up the phone,” my favorite song of 2016:

[Travis and Young Thug] don't miss. They can't lose. The instrumental is everything I've come to expect from them. Reverend Quavo is also involved, leading by example by refusing to “discriminize.” The song just makes me happy. And in a year where happiness just didn't seem sustainable, having this song on-demand for the past 6 months made things just a bit more bearable. Travis said he released "pick up the phone" specifically for the kids; he and I are both '92 babies, but I'm 14 all over again once that beat drops and I hear Thugger’s voice. And I'm so okay with that.

“Up to Something” combines my favorite aspects of “Drunk” and “pick up the phone,” super-boosted by an instrumental from Metro Boomin, arguably — and probably, save for Yung Berg of all people — the most prolific producer in hip-hop today. This song is clearly Thugger’s show, replete with a vintage chorus from Jeffery and an undeniably fun sing-song flow throughout his verses — “I can’t complain, I got ice in my bezel / I’m not racist, I got white in my Bentley / Caught a rabbit, it was ice all up in it / HELL YEAH!” — but there’s a more sinister presence waiting in the wings, and it has much more to do with Travis’s looming shadow than any of Metro’s drums. Trav and Jeffery are unquestionably my (and I’d argue the) platonic hip-hop Yin & Yang: Thugger providing the airier, more fanciful rhythms and Travis keeping the two grounded in reality via his precisely blunt approach. Trav’s not even around much here, but he’s around just enough — and most importantly, he never lets you forget he’s here. This time, his Cudi-like hums and ad-libs are more than sufficient. On “Up to Something,” Travis is the runway for Young Thug’s takeoff, and boy does Thugger soar on this one.

Moral of the story: these two ought to make an EP very soon. I’m mad at myself that after their own run of dominance on this list, I couldn’t in good conscience place them any higher than #7, as they were unfortunate victims of a remarkable year in music. I mean, I’m not even done writing about Travis Scott. So yeah, spoiler alert.

I really want Masego to become a megastar in this music industry. Like, really really.

Masego spent his summer of 2017 touring as the opening act for GoldLink, who’d become one of my personal favorites over the course of the year. For the uninitiated, remember how much of a rocket “Crew” was last summer; for those who know, GoldLink’s At What Cost was undeniably one of 2017’s best albums, and I could not miss the chance to see him rip through the entire thing live. Masego was, truthfully, an afterthought — as are most opening acts, I suppose. If the opener is good, that’s a bonus, but the opening act typically isn’t who folks paid to see. So ultimately, there’s no harm if the opening act leaves much to be desired.

Sego left absolutely nothing on the table. Halfway through his set, I was all in: his charisma, his musicality, his love of the music, his clear desire to be great at what he does. It all came out on that stage. How is Linky supposed to upstage that? I pondered during the show’s intermission. And while GoldLink’s performance was very good, I couldn’t help but compare it to Masego’s, a guy obviously born to be a professional musician. Even still, I’ve yet to see another opening act so polished in my 10+ years of attending concerts, and the guy hadn’t even released a studio album yet! If Masego were a stock, I would’ve made a pretty substantial investment that night, on the spot. There is zero chance he won’t be a superduperstar. Imposible!

In September, Masego dropped his first studio album Lady Lady, and the whole LP is a gem. After seriously struggling selecting which song would make the top-10, I settled on the title track, a phenomenal encapsulation of Sego’s greatest gifts. “Lady Lady” is Masego’s TrapHouseJazz subgenre, just condensed and edited for time. My favorite moment of the song comes about halfway in, Sego easing into a mini-scat while trying to gas himself up to talk to the woman of his dreams. Beautifully — almost poetically — that courage gradually builds, until Masego isn’t even worried about being composed anymore; he masterfully transitions between timidity, coolness, and desperation all in the course of 45 seconds, capping it with what has to be my favorite saxophone solo ever. (Major shoutout to Sounwave on this production, too — he and Masego put all four of their feet in this one.)

Not everyone can make a song like “Lady Lady,” and I’m becoming increasingly convinced that, actually, there’s only one person who can. Peel back all the layers of this song — of this album, really — and tell me someone else who can piece that puzzle back together. Seriously, if you know another musician who can, let me know. Because I’m not seeing it. Masego’s definitely a one-of-one. And even wilder, he’s just getting started.

I’ll be frank: even as a (self-proclaimed) Travis Scott superfan, writing about the guy comes with its own set of, er, difficulties. And that’s probably the kindest word I can use.

Everything I’ve written so far about Trav has centered around his elusiveness, his undeniable talent to set the mood of a track sitting in direct conflict with the listener’s (fairly frequent, I’d say) uncertainty of how much tangible, quantifiable influence he’s had on the final product. Let’s take — hell — “Up to Something,” for example: originally released a few years back as a Young Thug loosie named “Drown,” Trav has been credited for everything from a simple feature to giving actual co-production, and both of those plus everything in-between could absolutely be true. Except, now mastered, it’s officially a Metro Boomin, Southside, and Allen Ritter joint, and given how liberally artists take actually listing their project’s featured artists nowadays (another trend of which Travis was, for better or worse, at the fore), Metro and his co-producers could’ve given the sole feature credit to the guy who does most of the track’s vocal work and not the other guy who is just very much around. I’m sure Travis’s history with the track played a factor into how he was credited, but again, given Travis’s own modus operandi, let’s also not pretend he’s owed any benefit of the doubt either.

A student of the old Kanye (and maybe the new one, too), Travis has been kindly compared to his mentor for his curation talents, an uncanny and unteachable ability to gather talent and maximize theirs for his own musical benefit. But, yes, if you’d like to take the glass-half-empty approach, you could call Travis an outright thief largely dependent on the musical gifts of others to prop himself up as some sort of peerless wunderkind: think DJ Khaled if Khaled actually wanted to be in the songs instead of on their periphery (which Khaled actually did once or twice, to dismal results).

I myself had to decide how moral I wanted to be about this whole concept when I learned — to my continued consternation — that he jacked “pick up the phone” from Young Thug and singer-songwriter Starrah, neither of whom were notified ahead of time that Travis intended to use their song as his single. If we choose to believe the “innocent” version of the song’s timeline, Starrah wrote the “pick up the phone” as a reference for Travis, who then — in his musical omniscience — was so certain the song would be a hit that he jumped the gun and claimed the song for himself without getting clearance through the proper channels. But it would’ve been quite simple for him to credit Thugger and Starrah even if he wanted to market the song as his own, no? Seems a bit nefarious, if not unsympathetic, to claim two other artists’ work for yourself and not anticipate they’d feel a way about it. Ultimately, all the folks involved came to some sort of agreement: “pick up the phone” was released as an official single co-leading Young Thug and crediting Starrah as a writer, and Thugger clearly still enjoys working with Trav, so their relationship appears to be workable, if not mended altogether. But stories like that, and this — and especially this one — make you wonder, even just a little. You never want to assume the worst, especially about a guy this obviously talented, and so we’re left to hope these are wild coincidences and not patterns of more sinister behavior.

That brings us to “YOSEMITE,” a song so delightfully airy that I’m never not disappointed when it's over, a 150-second victory lap that sees Trav incredulously detailing his unbelievable fortune these past few years:

Now that I’m home, back off the road

We shut it down, playing their souls

Put checks in the streets, J number 4’s

Saint Laurent feet, put it on toes

Take it with me, double your dose

Covered with angels that’s watching my soul

Jet got a bed, it’s bigger windows

Said I’d be there in 10, but I got there in 4

I feel like I’m chosen — I’m covered in gold!

Cue the Cudi hums! It’s magical, mystifying, and makes you root so hard for him to keep winning — until you discover he’s essentially curbed Gunna & Lil Baby’s entire flow from “Sold Out Dates,” described online as a “spiritual successor” to “YOSEMITE,” which is a kinder way of saying Travis once again stole somebody else’s song.

But again, I can’t say that I care. Does biting have the same effect if you do it better than the person you bit? Is that even a relevant question? Drake bites whole genres, if that’s the game we’re playing! Maybe Trav’s just such a believable superstar that these lyrics carry more weight coming from him than, say, NAV or Gunna or Starrah; any time I hear one of these brand-new rappers mention chartering private jets, I sort-of reflexively roll my eyes, but Trav absolutely has a jet with a bed and big-ass windows that can cover 10 hours of airspace in only 4. And I really really wouldn’t mind traveling alongside him and Gunna on that jet, I will not tell a lie.

I recognize I’ve written nearly 850 words to ultimately absolve Trav of any of his musical sins — at least among this committee of one — but truthfully, this video will tell you everything you really need to know about the power of this song. Could’ve saved myself some time.

I am Binky. Binky is I. And “YOSEMITE” is #5 in this year’s rankings. Can’t be mad at the guy for doing other folks’ styles better than them, can you?

In the past 18 months, I’m pretty sure I’ve done a complete-180 on the GOAT.

Let’s go back into time: May 2017, I said, out loud, to a group of folks gathered at my brother Melvin’s 25th birthday party that if JAY-Z were considering releasing another album, I’d prefer that he not.

I’ll be honest: I’m not an impartial Hov fan, and I will listen to and very much enjoy any material he releases at this stage of his career, but I’d just recently spent a summer enjoying the ultimately forgettable Magna Carta… Holy Grail, and if I were in for another round of that, I preferred he not release another B- album that wouldn’t help his discography in the slightest. Including his very meh guest turn alongside his bride on DJ Khaled’s “Shining,” I couldn’t see how 14 versions of that would satisfy anybody, Hov himself included. I wanted something more original than what we’d initially gotten from post-retirement JAY-Z — an assortment of brag-raps, opulence, painting talk, references to his wife as a prize, early-age Blue, and many, many more brag-raps. So pardon my disbelief that a mid-40s rapper would want to tinker with his very profitable formula. Again, I was going to listen to whatever his next project was or wasn’t, because I’m a shill. But I was dubious it would be any good.

Six weeks later, JAY-Z released 4:44, surprising a constituency far beyond me with how emotionally bare and therefore new it actually did feel. Again, post-retirement Hov had provided his fans a veneer of transparency — my wife’s famous and hot, my daughter’s already rich, and all my friends are rich, too! — but it all felt somewhat hollow, like they too were mere accomplishments amongst his vast collection of trophies, talking points on (many) records where the main subject otherwise had little interesting to share. Hov uses 4:44 to shift that paradigm, reckoning with what his ego wrought karmically and vowing not to repeat those same mistakes for his sake and that of his future lineage, demonstrating a level of humility sort-of antithetical to his brand. I mean, image doesn’t actually matter when you’re about to lose your family and a potential fortune, but still: plenty of folk have let their egos cost them family and a lot more, and those people haven’t been worth $900 million. I love “Family Feud” as a singular piece of art (more Beyoncé harmonizing with the Clark Sisters, please!), but as part of the larger story 4:44 aspires to tell, her presence on the track — joyous, vibrant, in agreement with the album’s manifesto — reaffirmed my faith in a relationship I was stunned to learn had fissures in the first place. In the midst of their perceived marital issues, first highlighted on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and then seemingly confirmed throughout 4:44, Hov became the punching line of much of pop culture and certainly of their relationship, relegated to being known as the fuck-up husband of the most beautiful woman on the planet instead of the greatest rapper of all-time. It forever bugged me that her fans seemed legitimately hurt by their reconciliation, and so I doubled down on the guy, amazed that the transparency and reflection his critics were demanding still did not seem to be good enough for their forgiveness. Whatever.

June’s EVERYTHING IS LOVE extended 4:44’s communiqué that all is well within the Knowles-Carter household, a more natural successor to Watch the Throne than anything Jay and Kanye would likely produce in 2019. (Yoncé really seemed to relish her turn at being a rapper throughout this project.) While “APESHIT” is the obvious choice for a year-end list, the stadium anthem with the pop appeal, and “HEARD ABOUT US” is my subjective favorite (I need to roller-skate to that song within the next 90 days, for real), “BLACK EFFECT” expertly manifests the blackness of their love in a way that makes my heart smile, the album’s very believable reminder that their accumulated wealth does not mean they’ve forsaken the revolution. In fact, they seem to argue that their access to particular resources makes them a greater asset to their people — and therefore a pretty significant threat to the status quo, should they choose to be. And they’re not wrong: from Hov highlighting his recent, exaggerated run-ins with law enforcement to Beyoncé articulating the importance of a black woman’s mere existence in places of high society, neither of them have been reticent in discussing their blackness in relation to their success. Now raising 3 children of their own and fully committed to each other while still at the peak of their respective musical powers, what better time than now to show their babies and the world that they’re in this together? Maybe the revolution will be televised, all things considered. The Carters might own a television station next.

Anything Jay and Bey do give us is blatantly intentional — they’ve been so secretive for the totality of their relationship that I couldn’t help but view the publicity of these issues with a skeptical eye — but whether slightly coerced or completely voluntary, shoutout to JAY-Z for giving us 2 great albums within a 12-month span when I could hardly see a path to 1 half-decent one. Beyoncé tends to have that effect on music, I’d presume.

It is positively eerie how much Christian, er, King Combs resembles his daddy. Like, almost freaky. So the fact Puff’s youngest son willingly chose to walk in his dad’s enormous shadow isn’t totally surprising. Give the young man the benefit of time and experience, and he might just live up to the legacy.

A few years back, Puff (and for continuity’s sake, I’ll be referring to Puff solely as Puff throughout this essay) went on a media blitz promoting a slew of projects, and Christian was directly next to him for all of it, like he’d decided to take a graduate-level course on self-marketing and his father just so happened to be overqualified to teach it. During one particular trip to Hot 105.1’s The Breakfast Club, Charlemagne asked Christian point-blank if he intended to start his own music career, and he replied confidently in the affirmative; later in the interview, after Puff announces that Christian is indeed signed to Bad Boy Entertainment, Christian tells the room he’ll be using King Combs as his stage name, earning something of a patronizing pat-on-the-back from Charlemagne and DJ Envy.

Watch the entire interview if you have the time. Puff clearly has Christian there for media training; Christian is definitely confident but still very shy, polite but a little unsure, like he’s more a teenage kid stuck running errands with his dad and less the spawn of Puff Daddy, entertainment savant, giving his first professional interview. And even though a (small) portion of the interview is dedicated to discussing Christian’s burgeoning music career and desire to be more emcee than entertainer, the show’s hosts still treat him like something of a novelty, simultaneously smiling in Christian’s face while seemingly laughing to themselves that of course Puff’s son wants to be a rapper now. Without passing judgment on the quality of that show, the three hosts can be spectacular trolls when they want — especially the men — and if they weren’t being dismissive, they were certainly hazing the kid. But Puff, acting almost as both dad and hype-man, continued bolstering Christian’s confidence despite everyone else’s incredulity at Christian’s viability as an artist. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” declared Puff after Charlemagne semi-jokingly suggested Christian choose a moniker less aspirational than King. “That’s why he’s next to me and beside me. Imma raise him.”

Three years later, it looks like dad taught his protégé very well. “Love You Better” was officially released in February, so it appears I spent 10 full months preaching his gospel, wondering how anyone could still be unconvinced of his future starpower. Admittedly, having Chris Brown sing your hooks is never a bad idea, but again, Christian perfectly channels his dad’s charisma, seemingly blooming into an actual rapper rapper in no time. He more than holds his own next to Chris, never allowing the veteran to snatch his spotlight. Between that sample and Christian’s flow and that very dope, Biggie-inspired video, I still haven’t figured out why this song wasn’t more of a rocket. He’s Puff’s kid! And he’s good! I’d be so mad if I made a smash like this and my music mogul father didn’t payola my way to the top. (I’m joking. Kinda.)

Bringing this full circle, Christian visited The Breakfast Club this past summer without his dad, holding court in a way he never could’ve on that day in August 2015 when he announced his impending foray into music. And this time, to their credit, Charlemagne, Envy, and Angela Yee gave the kid his due. “That song ‘Love You Better’ is doing really good,” Yee conceded. The conversation soon turned to the 2018 XXL Freshman Class, and when asked if he felt he deserved a spot on the once-coveted list, young King Combs continued to play it cool. “I’m definitely in the Freshman Class. I’m definitely at the top of my class. But if XXL thinks otherwise, then, you know, it’s up to them.”

Well, none of those other freshman made this important list. And in 2019, I find this ranking far more credible than XXL’s, so yeah. All hail King Combs. The reign’s just begun.