When the California musician zayALLCAPS was a teenager, his home state was very high, very horny, and very unsure what to do about it. In Los Angeles, Stones Throw was churning out breezy synth-funk; a $10 Uber away in Fairfax, Tyler, the Creator was pirating those same beats to rap about kidnapping his crushes. Woozy, weed-brained R&B was a shared musical language, but among the fluent, there was a tonal gap: earnestness, à la the Internet, versus edginess, à la (the rest of) Odd Future. A hidden consequence, looking back, was the illusion that swag and sincerity were mutually exclusive. Today, for some former Golf Wang shoppers, well-packaged rage remains the answer. Others feel earnestness is more appealing, finding that “You bring me joy” ages a teeny bit better than “I’ll fuck the freckles off your face.”
zayALLCAPS is eclectic enough to fill the gray area and inventive enough to color it in. On “Picklez3,” a standout from last year’s iMessage Platinum: Hosted by autotuneKaraoke, he flits over a surgical rework of the Matt Martians earworm “Southern Isolation,” temp-checking before the basses, plural, drop: live and digital alike, the sub-bass an odd newcomer to the original’s jazz-club soulscape. Fused together, they form a sort of drunken stagger, wrestling between two attitudes, two eras. And slick as Zay may sound, he isn’t flexing, or flopping, but something in-between: “doing pretty good,” “feeling sorta like a man,” “trying hard” to brag “just a little.” The beat is suspended between two extremes, and he is, too—swag-aspirant, but so comfortable that he ends up sounding swagged-out anyway.
On art Pop * pop art, his latest and best album, zayALLCAPS commits to this impulse to complicate familiar templates: not merely indulging in blog-era nostalgia, but reworking the anatomy of a love song circa 2010. Take the brilliant dirty macking of “MTV’s Pimp My Ride,” which uses the titular show as a metaphor for liking a girl who already has a man: “You know I seen your old ride/That’s a hunk of junk.” Dump your boyfriend is a familiar premise, but the methodology—thirsty-ass vocal harmonies, heavyweight hook, inventive analogy—is so raw and freewheeling, it feels like it’s never been done before.
In a recent interview, zayALLCAPs described the name of his record label, autotuneKaraoke, as “a juxtaposition” between “robotic” pitch correction and “hella human” karaoke vocals. On paper, sure, it’s a contradiction. But across art Pop * pop art, he makes a strong case for the intimacy of vocal modulation, not hiding behind effects but using them to contour his humanity. This is why a well-produced song like “PROCESS” doesn’t feel pretentious: He’s singing his ass off with Auto-Tune, but it only works this well because he’s also beat-boxing the drums.
