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Before we get into things, hip-hop is 50 years old this year and some of us were expecting a feast of new raps, but the scene has been a little barren.
We expect anyone who considers themselves a real rapper or MC to drop at least once this year … if not this year, then when? Get off love and hip-hop and hit the studio.
Anyhow, Suffer For Beauty follows the release of this duo’s first tape together, Dreams Dont Pay Bills, in 2021.
We’re all for thunderous starts to hip-hop albums and this has that. An interesting beat is chosen for the opening ping.
It’s a slightly awkward beginning, with the chorus seeing this gifted rapper brandishing a phrase involving the game counting him out when it shouldn’t have.
It has a vibe reminiscent of T.I.’s, but the “ping ping ping” hook is a bit off-putting and sounds a tad silly.
Switch Sides would have been a better start – it has a hybrid beat with a darker essence that makes use of the west coast influence that YoungstaCPT has adopted so wholeheartedly.
He draws the proverbial line in the sand, stating he will never switch sides or abandon his Gen Y team, or the Western Cape for that matter.
Who Shot Who? uses a heavy reference of one of the best diss tracks in history, The Notorious B.I.G.’s Who Shot Ya?
This provides the first rewind moment of the whole offering, as his flows in the first stanza are so in pocket over the swollen beat with the loose flute and disjointed keys from the famous sample first used on a diss track to Tupac.
He almost provides a resolution to the feud between the west and east coasts in the US.
This is such a hard track, probably the closest thing we have to gangster rap, and using an east coast sample to govern a west coast-sounding street thumper is a simple but ingenious move.
We could do with Youngsta making use of other artists for his choruses; just something to consider.
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He handles most of these responsibilities throughout the album. Even on the romantic Doing Her Hair, which features Nashiefah.
He’s looking to scoop his date up and pauses for a moment to bask in the brilliance of his queen – still tending to her hair – before date night.
He takes care of this hook again and again, a repetitive structure like ping but this was better, as Nashiefah – a vocalist of the trap soul persuasion – soothes the bite of Youngsta’s voice when she provides harmonics to accompany him on the refrain.
She should have done the whole hook alone, but it’s a breezy-sounding track.
Near was hard to get into; on first rotation it was a skip and, fortunately, just beyond that record lies Alhamdulilah, and Shaney provides another dark canvas for this MC to craft mental images of life in Cape Town and the choices some might make to make ends meet.
Now you know we’re expecting great things when an artist has a song called Oppenheimer and it’s a scorching take on colonialism and the pillaging of South African resources.
He is always best when he isn’t looking for radio spins – and we get those to pay bills and get the booty shaking – but it is enjoyable to hear a rapper use the art to reflect their times in an unapologetic fashion.
Expect Myself is a good example of this – in the grand scheme of things, it is a generic trap-sounding offering, but this rapper can do the expected and still sound like he’s a cut above the rest. It means more when the spill has soul to it.
The highlight and, naturally, the lead single is Benni McCarthy.
“People say that I was overrated, I was fired from Cape Town City and that I was going to fail and that I’m not a good coach.
So, I wonder now who’s the one who is laughing” – a snippet from the local footballing legend, after he was hired by Manchester United.
The clip makes way for this drill track that sees Youngsta use Afrikaans and a British twang all in the same song, and it makes perfect sense, drawing on the beautiful game of football as a motif for this slapper.
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We’ve been saying that the epicentre of hip-hop has shifted from the south of the US to the UK, and this song stands as testimony to that. It also spills beautifully into another drill offering called Catchy.
The bottom end of this album is how we would have preferred the whole thing to sound, with the last two tracks boosting this rating on their own. Serve us more of that.
