Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn, best known to rap fans as Future, is possibly one of the most famous trap music stars on the planet.
In the UK, his name may not trip off the tongue like with fellow rappers Drake, Kendrick Lamar or Ye (Kanye West), but that’s all about to soon change when he heads to London for this year’s Wireless Festival, as special guest to Nicky Minaj.
So significant is his influence on the urban music scene that last month, Future was one of Spotify’s top 15 most streamed artists (racking up a huge 54 million plus monthly listens).
His No.1 March release of We Don’t Trust You, made with long-time pal and collaborator Metro Bloomin, was quickly replaced by the duo’s follow-up We Still Don’t Trust You three weeks later. It marked the shortest gap between new number one albums by an artist since... Future hit two number ones in successive weeks in 2017, first with his self-titled album Future followed by HNDRXX.
With his trademark dreads (sometimes dark, sometimes bleached bright white) and body mapped head-to-toe in tattoos, Future personifies the ultimate rock’n’roll rap star.
He first hit the trap music scene headlines in 2011, with a mixtape called Dirty Sprite (the nickname given to ‘lean’, a purple-hued mix of prescription strength Codeine cough syrup and soda, usually Sprite).
Trap’s anthemic, rolling, hypnotic bouncing beat – full of deep 808 long, distorted sub bass kick drums, double-time cymbal hi-hats and sweeping synthesized strings, brass and keyboards – proved the perfect conduit for Future’s trademark mumbling growl, sounding like something at once syrupy and scratchy, like gravel being tumbled through honey.
He was following hot on the heels of Gucci Mane, Fetty Wap and Migos, pioneers of the trap music movement that had grown out of the gritty, drug-fuelled streets of Atlanta in the late Nineties and early 2000s (taking its name from the city’s crack dens known as ‘trap houses’). The style draws on influences of hip hop, gansta rap, soul and funk, as well as being infused with rave and electronic dance music’s build ups, drops and breakdowns.
Having started out as ‘Meathead’ with the Dungeon Family collective – so named after Rico Wade’s home studio in the basement of his mother’s house in East Point that spawned the rising talents of Organized Noise, Outkast (Andre 3000 and Big Boi), TLC, and Goodie Mob (including Cee-Lo Green) – Future brought a new vibe to trap’s hardcore ‘sex, drugs, guns and mile high club’ lyrics with the innovative use of autotune and an often incoherent singing style.
Much of his childhood in the Atlanta neighbourhood of Kirkwood was spent being looked after by aunts and uncles (who just happened to live in a dope house) while his single mother went to work (his father left when Nayvadius was 10). Future once regaled tales to renowned hip hop journalist Elliott Wilson (in GQ) about being surrounded by “a lot of drugs and a lot of guns, sometimes being driven to school by a junkie named Fred”, before dropping out of high school in his senior year.
Inevitably, Future threads these early life tales through his music, “yielded by a kind of self-contained universe of affecting songs about addiction, trauma, self-loathing, and doomed relationships”, a Vanity Fair writer once wrote. “I was just being me, just doing me, just doing music, trying to bring something new,” Future told the music portal Genius. “My music – that’s pain. I come from pain, so you gonna hear it in my music.”
His reputation as a bad boy grew with lyrics laced with ‘Raris and Lambers, G4s (the Gulfstream IV jet just like P Diddy’s), drugs (Molly, Xans, Percocets), guns (“I got the juice and the carbines” – Low Life) and a clear distrust of women (“if she catch me cheating, I will never tell her sorry” – Low Life, again).
And don’t forget the fashion: Gucci, Ferragamo, Bally and Jimmy Choo were all name checked early on, in tracks like the 2011 pumping ‘Same Damn Time’; Audermars (Piguet) and Patek (Philippe) get popped regularly on tracks like Life is Good; and Chanel Junkie pays the ultimate tribute to one of his favourite brands (the rapper rarely seen without his strands of diamonds and pearls, emblazoned with CCs).
When once asked by The Cut to describe his style, he said “Everything.” But “if you want to dress like Future,” advises his stylist Bobby Wesley Williams, “you have to get yourself some sick eyewear and a lot of jewellery; and exclusive sneakers as well.”
Future’s savviness has proven catnip to musical collaborations ranging from Kanye West, Drake, Kendrick Lamar and DJ Khaled to Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion and Miley Cyrus. In just over a decade, working through various musical personas such as Astronaut Kid, Pluto, The Wizrd and more latterly Future Hendrix, the rapper has produced nine studio albums, 24 mixtapes, two extended plays, and 117 singles (including 61 as a featured artist). He has also released three collaborative albums, curated the 2018 soundtrack for the film Superfly (featuring the likes of Lil Wayne, Gunna and Young Thug), and starred in director Marcus A. Clarke’s 2019 documentary The Wizrd.
In 2015 alone Future produced three album-quality mixtapes – Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights – followed by the critically acclaimed album DS2 and his What a Time to Be Alive joint project with Drake, while Life Is Good featuring Drake achieved Diamond status in 2020 (read: over 10 million units sold or streamed).
In the US, Future became the only artist to appear on the Hot 100 every week throughout 2022, thanks to hits such as the Grammy-winning hit Wait for U (featuring Drake and Tems) from his album I Never Liked You.
He has been described as ‘a cranky creative with a platinum touch’ who has reinvented the blues for the 21st century
According to Future’s long-term engineer and mixer, the late Seth Firkins, the rapper’s writing process always starts with beats. Apparently, Firkins and Future would work together in studios, hotel rooms, even the tour bus, pulling out beats for the rapper to overdub his vocals, never writing anything down, just going back and forth til it felt right.
Lyrics could come from anywhere, from the conversations going on around him, Firkins said. “He can do 10 songs in an evening, and I don’t understand how he never runs out of melodies… And after he’s finished overdubbing his vocal, he rarely goes back and does it again. The way it comes out, it’s the way it’s meant to be, whether you understand the lyrics or not,” Firkins told Sound on Sound magazine in 2017.
Such genius has led to British music journalist Simon Reynolds crediting Future for “reinventing blues for the 21st century, restoring it not just as a texture (raspy, rough-toned) or as a style of delivery (somewhere between speech and singing) but as a mode of feeling, an existential stance towards the world” (Pitchfork). One rap aficionado journalist described Future as “a cranky creative with a platinum touch”. GQ had the last word by declaring Future as “the best rapper alive” in 2022.
No wonder Belvedere Vodka wanted to collaborate with Future on its latest cinematic ad, directed by Hollywood favourite Taika Waititi, for its new release, the Belvedere 10, housed in a pure white faceted bottle standing ten levels tall.
Just as Waititi worked his mercurial mischief with Daniel Craig in its 2022 campaign – sending the usually sophisticated Bond actor strutting and thrusting like a camp peacock around the public areas of the Cheval Blanc Paris before ending up (quite literally) in the disco-lit pool of the penthouse – here he sets the scene in a dilapidated hacienda turned nightclub in a dusty desert at sundown for an old-fashioned blinging-to-the-nines showdown with Future.
Dressed all in white, complete with white croc cowboy boots (Future) and Saturday Night Fever suit (Waititi), the pair must perform a humorously elaborate coded handshake before the new bottle can be revealed and its smooth liquid brilliance can be tasted. It’s a brilliant take on traversing that fine line “that allows humour and rebelliousness to exist within luxury,” enthuses Waititi.
A willingness to be part of such tongue-in-cheek irreverence perhaps reflects a slight mellowing in Future’s angry past. Now 40, the rapper appears cognisant if not regretful of the impact his music has made in the past. “I have a responsibility to tell the truth,” he told Zane Lowe following the release of Sorry in 2017.
“I didn’t do anything for ill intention towards someone else, no matter how it might have been perceived. The biggest thing is trying to be yourself all the time, everyone’s not going to like it but who cares, as long as you’re being yourself, you’ve gotta wake up with that person at the end of the day, you gotta be able to look at that person in the mirror and be like, I know I’m being myself, I’m not being anyone else.”
You could even say he’s getting a little soppy. “I want to be able to use my voice for a lot of good, not just for when you’re going through a break up or you want to have a party lifestyle. I want to speak for the man who has found true love, I want to speak for the man that went through something but also felt they wasn’t going to become the person that they are and they listened to Future and they became a better person,” he said in an interview with Fader magazine.
“My goal is to create work that touches, motivates and inspires others,” he later told Variety. “I’m honest and unapologetic in my life. It’s easy to judge people; it’s difficult to live in your truth. In the end, I’m willing to create with whoever shares those same thoughts.”
As to what’s next, the answer lies simply in his name. “Every project, every time he lays a track, it’s forward thinking,” says his manager, Ebonie Ward. “Everything I love, everything I’ve got, I put it into my music,” the singer and producer adds. “The outcome has yet to be determined, still to this day, I’m still building on that.” Whatever it might be, it seems certain that the future will be bright.
