clipse x ADÉLA

what the fuck do those two artists have with each other? GREAT question. and the answer, of course, is that they have us, as people in a room with speakers and hearts that beats at different tempos for different reasons. frankly, i'm SICK to death of the tyranny of the number, the cruel math of a ten-point scale that tries to convince us that an artist's heart and soul is something that can be quantified.

i’ve been living inside clipse’s let god sort em out since it descended from the heavens. to say i’ve been listening to it feels like too small a word. i’ve been absorbing it, letting its particular shade of shadow color my understanding of hip hop. it is a perfect album, not like a diamond, but like a well-worn blade. it's precise, familiar, and capable of a beautiful and terrifying cut. pusha t and malice are engaged in a kind of sacred linguistic masonry, building towering structures of rhyme with bricks of trauma and triumph (and coke). then pharrell comes in. my god. he's built beats so minimalistic that pusha's au pair could drive an audi through them, but they are so complete, so utterly full in spite of their simplicity. it's a masterclass in negative space. LGSEO is the sound of a path being cleared back to something essential. if it doesn't win at the grammys, the academy will hear my temper tantrum from the east coast.

then, there is the glorious noise of adéla. the provocateur is not a monument, nor do i think it's trying to be. it's a strobing flash of thong from under a miniskirt, loaded eye contact from across a smoky room, the sweat of two bodies pressed together by the dj booth. it is delectably attitudinal, a perfect little grenade of greasy, slutty, club-kid euphoria. to listen to it is to feel a profound gratitude that she exists entirely outside the clean, focus-grouped confines of katseye. (who i thoroughly enjoy but i don't see a world in which their labels allow them to embody this concept.) this is wholly ADÉLA. visceral, dirty, delightfully profane. it is frenetic and fast-paced and so, so good for the sacred act of throwing ass on the floor.

and so i have arrived at the trap of ranking albums __ out of 10. my heart, in its infinite and contradictory wisdom, holds both of the following as true: let got sort em out feels like a event that changes the weather for everyone. it has weight, consequence. the provocateur feels like a event that changes the weather for me, impacting my day and my day only. to assign them a number would be to ask which is more important: the earthquake or the first flower that pushes through the cracked earth afterward? the genre-defining shift or the body-defining shudder? i love them both, but they are not the same kind of love. one is a love you study. the other is a love you sweat out.

and maybe that’s the whole of it. maybe the only review that matters is the one that charts the geography of my own pleasure, that maps the distance between my head and my hips, and never once tries to build a ladder between the two.

numeric rankings are a funeral for a feeling, the arithmetic of the apathetic. what is a 7? what does it mean to be an 8? who did the math to decide that the tremble in your lower back during a certain synth line is worth one point less than the ache in your chest from a perfectly placed verse? my method is simpler, and therefore more complex. it asks only two questions. first: does this thing feel like it could have come from anyone else, or is it a perfect, organic extension of the artist’s own strange and specific universe? does it sound like them, or does it sound like them finally? and second: does it make me feel something, anything, other than the slow, gray creep of indifference? does it conjure an image—a sweaty club, a rain-slicked street, a lonely room at 3am—or does make my eyes glaze over?

a numeric score is a desperate attempt to standardize a miracle. it tries to make a science out of the ghost that passes through you when the bass drops or when a couplet lands exactly right. it’s a language for people who have forgotten how to shiver. i’d rather tell you that let god sort em out is a maybach with flawless interior detailing, and that the provocateur is the thrilling, dangerous scent of gasoline and perfume in its back seat. one is the artifact, the other is the experience. and you can’t rate that. you can only live inside it. the body keeps its own score, and it’s never a number. it’s a pulse. it’s a flinch. it’s the decision to play the song again, immediately, just to feel that same tiny fracture in your day.