The Future is Pink Siifu

Shout out to long, time-commitment art. Not all of it, obviously—devoting multiple hours of your life to hollow bloat sucks—but there's nothing quite like luxuriating in the sprawl of a rich, excessive film or album. Everyone loves a tight, bite-sized marvel of efficiency, and with good reason. But the argument that the best art inherently has no wasted breath, no puzzling interludes, is dispassionate and borderline fascist at heart. I sympathize with that opinion in the current era of streaming-optimized 80-minute pop albums and fan-service-driven Easter egg factories masquerading as superhero movies. But deep down, if it's an artist I trust, I usually want more.

Pink Siifu is a rapper whose last two solo albums, 2022's Gumbo'! and January's Black'!Antique, are dense, lengthy listens (if you include the former's deluxe edition, both are over 74 minutes long). He released them via his own Dynamite Hill label, so this is very clearly not the case of a Drake/Gunna/Lil Uzi Vert with a major label behind them treading the fine line between "throw everything at the wall and see what hits" and "how long is too long for the average consumer?" But even compared to bigger-budget albums that are ostensibly constructed to include one or two songs for every taste, Gumbo'! and Black'!Antique are wildly diverse by today's standards.

Two songs into Black'!Antique, my initial read was "society has progressed past the need for JPEGMAFIA." Siifu has made abrasive music before, chiefly on 2020's lo-fi, punk-inspired Negro, but here, he's more unpredictable, pivoting seamlessly between outright noise and bass-heavy moshpit-rap in way reminiscent of, but more skillful than JPEG's edgelord aggression.

I was prepared (and excited) for a full album of industrial angst, but by the time Black'!Antique ended, I had all but forgotten about its opening salvo and instead dwelled on its gentler, more methodical, but no less experimental final minutes. Closer "Blackwater'!" is a swampy blues-folk ballad that would fit right in on Benjamin Booker and Kenny Segal's great recent album LOWER, and it closes, as Gumbo'! did, with a coveted spoken word piece by Dungeon Family legend Big Rube. Siifu runs through enumerable different sounds throughout the album, often within the same song, but the markedly different tones of Black'!Antique's start and finish give an arc to what may otherwise seem like an unorganized jumble.

I can remember a time when calling a rapper a "jack-of-all-trades" had overwhelmingly negative connotations. After Kanye made Graduation in 2007, a full decade of up-and-comers took the wrong lessons from that album—sampling Daft Punk and Steely Dan, aspiring to be a rockstar—while failing to recognize that inventiveness and charisma are prerequisites for such ambition. Artists like Kid Cudi, ASAP Rocky, Theophilus London, Travis Scott, Brockhampton, Childish Gambino, Denzel Curry, Vic Mensa, and Logic all bit off more than they could chew at certain points during their respective rises, and without fail it watered down their art.

I locate Drake's 81-minute-long 2016 album Views as the moment when major labels took heed of Billboard's 2015 decision to give streaming data more weight in chart calculations. Since the advent of the long-playing record in 1948, audio format has dictated album length. Vinyl LPs hold around 50 minutes, and that was the standard (double albums notwithstanding) for years, even as cassette tapes gained popularity in the 80s. CDs allow for 74 minutes, so with their popularity came a widespread increase in the average length of major label albums. Streaming is unlimited. This incremental growth has always been marketed to the consumer as "more bang for your buck," but majors are clearly more interested in the odds of landing hit singles than paring albums down into all-killer-no-filler experiences for listeners.

Ironically, this has resulted in more uniform-sounding albums in the streaming era. Sure, amid the current boom in Spanish-language musica urbana, you might get an unexpected track with J Balvin or Anuel AA or Rauw Alejandro on an English-speaking rapper's album. But outside of craven marketing gimmicks, it has seemed more profitable to zero in on the sound of an artist's existing hits and throw in eight or 10 or 12 similarly vibed tracks in the hopes that one or maybe even two connects.

This is all a very long-winded, granular, insider-baseball explanation for why Pink Siifu stands out to me in the 2020s. Gumbo'! and Black'!Antique feel like realizations of the dream of late-'90s Southern rap, back when label money and underground creativity both aligned for a brief moment. But they also conjure up the utopia I naïvely envisioned in the early 2010s: cheaper-than-ever recording technology, a lower barrier of entry for independent artists, and subsequently, more creative, organic music untethered from the glittering prizes and endless compromises of boardroom interests. The corporate destruction of both eras didn't result in decades of stagnant music—that '90s Southern stuff actually doesn't do as much for me as the mixtape-driven free-for-all that followed in the 2000s—instead, the best artists did what they always do: carve out previously unthinkable new avenues to further their work.

What I admire even more than Siifu's individual versatility is his unmatched rolodex of collaborators. His last two albums are both guest-heavy, balancing contributions by longtime affiliates like Liv.e, Conquest Tony Phillips, Turich Benjy, and Roper Williams with a who's-who of left-of-center rap-adjacent talents like Rube, The Alchemist, Kenny Beats, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Valee, Zelooperz, Maxo, BbyMutha, Nick Hakim, Butcher Brown, HiTech, 454, Vayda, Fatboi Sharif, B L A C K I E, WiFiGawd, and Monte Booker. No one else could pull this backing cast without glaringly obvious missteps outside of their comfort zone.

Pink Siifu's albums flow seamlessly but unexpectedly. He can transform in the blink of an eye, blending in with his surroundings, contorting himself into the smallest pockets, and then expanding into a terrifying force of nature. He is an octopus.

Black'!Antique is not a perfect album. It's messy, unwieldy, and languorous by design, and doesn't feel as locked-in as the comparably long but slightly less adventurous Gumbo'!. Somehow, though, it makes me respect Pink Siifu even more.

We're living through an extended period of stylistic stagnation in music, where each year's new trends are categorized less by innovation than the late 20th Century or early 21st Century genres they choose to revive. Hip hop is the one sector that still consistently offers wildly unfamiliar sounds—check Pitchfork's coverage since No Bells' Gen Z mastermind Mano Sundaresan took over as editor. A lot of this stuff mystifies me, but I appreciate that. I'm about to turn 34; new avant garde music should confuse me, as it has every previous generation.

My dad has told me that in his mid-20s to early 30s, he believed that "good music died in 1971," the year he turned 20. I once played Iron Maiden's 1984 banger "2 Minutes to Midnight" around my mom (26 at the time of its release) and she responded by saying, "This is barely even music." Both of them are much more open-minded than these anecdotes suggest—but the disillusionment I've developed with popular music in my mid-30s is due to mind-numbing overfamiliarity rather than the blatant abstraction that understandably alienated the greatest generation, boomers, and Gen X'rs from what came after their era-defining favorites. This isn't because I'm an open-minded music critic—it's because over 70% of what's streamed on Spotify is older than a decade, it's because every year brings dozens of new chart smashes that gratuitously sample or interpolate decades-old hits, it's because I've lived through countless hollow revivals of pop-punk, nu-metal, synth-wave, butt rock, Lilith Fair-core, heartland rock, and even stomp-clap-ho-hey 2010s folk-rock.

Pink Siifu is not on the cutting edge of post-rage or post-plugg like OsamaSon, Nettspend, XavierSoBased, or even the Playboi Carti-indebted Ken Carson. He is very much a student of past sounds. On Black'!Antique, he interpolates Project Pat's 1999 "Out There" and samples Gangsta Boo's 2001 "Mask 2 My Face." Big Rube's inclusion is obvious catnip for any Dungeon Family fan. I will admit that this plays right into my hands as someone whose top two rap groups of all time are Three 6 Mafia and OutKast, but Siifu's homages to these revered titans exist alongside hundreds of others from the past decade, and I'm not excited by most of them.

Even the most baffling cutting-edge music is always influenced by something; what makes it stand out is a combination or muddling of elements in previously unthinkable ways. None of Siifu's favorite '90s rappers could have taken the chances that he does on Black'!Antique, recording and producing music with such a low budget, chaotically careening between sounds, and making in-roads with producers and vocalists from all over the global and stylistic map.

Black'!Antique is a product of focused individualism that also allows for collaboration, reverence for forebears, and unchecked sprawl. In 2025, that feels like the way forward.