Future lays out a fundamental truth of his music early on his new album, High Off Life: “Drug raids got me cold, got me cocky/Can’t stand it, won’t enjoy life if it ain’t toxic.” Cold and cocky are now his music’s default settings, and he’s escaped so many federal dragnets in his songs that he’s degenerated into an apathetic kingpin, fully embracing his inner heel. There is no greater example of him enjoying toxicity, or being enjoyably toxic, than “Posted With Demons,” a song that epitomizes his pitiless mentality: Blood money is best spent without regret. “Came off the block, I was posted with demons/You ain’t did the shit I did,” he repeats over and over, choosing not to disclose the particulars of those dealings. Instead, his verses lavish in a hedonistic lifestyle secured by that trapping (and his rapping about that trapping). A dark past made him the savage he is today, and he sounds like he’ll do anything to keep his libertine little world spinning.
Future is most exhilarating when he is a tenacious terror in both sound and vision. Here, he is a zooted, Auto-Tuned force of human nature, unrelenting in his disturbance to the peace—he pulls off on cops and recruits devil worshipers as drug mules. His flows are sometimes staccato, sometimes fluid, but always aloof. “Makin’ it, takin’ it, they see the wrong/If the streets don’t kill you first, nigga, it’s gon’ make you strong,” he raps, espousing greed like a hood Gordon Gekko and creating a timeline so hazy it’s hard to separate what he did from what he’s still doing. Produced by DJ Spinz (with TrellGotWings, Shades, and Okami), the song’s sample wails quietly behind Future as light strings and flutes surge and overlap. He knows exactly where and how to interject, when to exclaim, and when to murmur. All of the Dionysian splendor is in service of his epic self-indulgence, while the key to all this amorality is his inability to forget when he was starving, which stokes his insatiable hunger for all things. He wards off the demons from his past with a nonstop party.
Future is most exhilarating when he is a tenacious terror in both sound and vision. Here, he is a zooted, Auto-Tuned force of human nature, unrelenting in his disturbance to the peace—he pulls off on cops and recruits devil worshipers as drug mules. His flows are sometimes staccato, sometimes fluid, but always aloof. “Makin’ it, takin’ it, they see the wrong/If the streets don’t kill you first, nigga, it’s gon’ make you strong,” he raps, espousing greed like a hood Gordon Gekko and creating a timeline so hazy it’s hard to separate what he did from what he’s still doing. Produced by DJ Spinz (with TrellGotWings, Shades, and Okami), the song’s sample wails quietly behind Future as light strings and flutes surge and overlap. He knows exactly where and how to interject, when to exclaim, and when to murmur. All of the Dionysian splendor is in service of his epic self-indulgence, while the key to all this amorality is his inability to forget when he was starving, which stokes his insatiable hunger for all things. He wards off the demons from his past with a nonstop party.
