Nine Vicious blew up for a reason. Sure, the music has something to do with it: He’s unearthed some of the underground’s most precocious beatmakers (Patrick Garza, 406ahmad, R8) and shapeshifted 2010s radio hits into slimy, head-thumping bangers. But it’s deeper than that. The Georgia rapper is in love with fiasco. He might pose with his lips poking out, edges laid, and French tips on display before hopping on wax to throw homophobic slurs at you. He sparks beef as quickly as he squashes it and goes on all-caps rants dissing nondescript opps. Months after rapping he’s “finna turn to a Jew” ’cause his “bitch is a Jew” on “Listen Up Jews,” Nine Vicious threw on a big-ass Star of David chain for the newly released “Trevon O’Ryan Echols” music video.
This piano-laden number, named after himself, is track eight of 23 on Nine Vicious’ EMOTIONS, an album that doesn’t describe any of his emotions across its 71-minute runtime. On “Trevon,” he repeatedly shouts “So many emotions!” over the delicate keys to let you know what he’s been going through. “Being me, it ain’t easy,” he proclaims. Emotions, man. Shit is crazy. Maybe seeking depth here is unreasonable, but save for a few songs with good beats, EMOTIONS feels disingenuous: The professions of love and the assertions of gang ties get filtered through ragged melodies, half-baked flows, and words that mean less the more they’re repeated.
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Five albums and several mini projects into his career, Nine’s corniest, most unimaginative tendencies have proven to be the exact attributes that have made him famous. On the surface, it’s pretty harmless. Samples and interpolations are easy to catch, bars are shallow enough to get a middle-school locker room turnt. Here, with vintage A$AP Rocky in mind, he reworks “Fashion Killa” on “Fashion Killa” and neuters “Purple Swag” on “Purple Swag.” Nine’s creaking, warbling cadence makes for a Thug/Carti hybrid that’s distinct but still close enough to be familiar and palatable. When it works, it works: “Vivienne Westwood / RIP,” the only truly addictive song on here, is the best example of how elastic his delivery can be when he’s up for it. He’s spry on “Posing Tonight,” too, lurching from gruff bellows to 645AR squeaks.
When he’s not gliding through a dynamic flow, something I wished happened more here, only two types of Nine Vicious bars stick with me: the ones that are cringily shallow (“My new bitch from UK, call her fakemink”; “Just like Breaking Bad, need my lawyer, I call Saul”) and the ones that are clearly tryna be incendiary. “She give that head like a MAGA hat,” he raps on “Molly Ecstasy.” Without Patrick’s beaming theremin swells (“Vivienne Westwood / RIP,” “Blowing Emotions”) or ahmad’s orchestral finesse (“Trevon O’Ryan Echols”), his limitations as a songwriter would be more distracting than they already are.
