Ice Spice is a divisive figure in the world of rap. There are people who think her rise over the last two years is representative of all that’s wrong with rap: witness the wailing and gnashing of teeth that greeted her inclusion in Complex’s list of the 50 best New York rappers, albeit at No 50. Equally, there are people who posit her as something of a saviour figure, “a new rap star in a genre that sorely needs one”, as one recent US profile put it, citing statistics that point to “a steady decline in [rap]’s consumption”. Said figures suggested rap and R&B’s share of the US market had declined by 1.5% between 2022 and 2023, but it was still by far the biggest genre in America – no need to man the lifeboats just yet. But you can’t argue with the fact that Ice Spice (born Isis Gaston) is rap’s biggest breakout star in recent memory: feted by Taylor Swift and responsible for four US platinum singles in just over six months.
The weird thing is that the naysayers and boosters alike have reached their conclusions for exactly the same reasons. There is Ice Spice’s relentless pop focus. “Let’s talk drill / Who bigger than she?” she brags on her debut album’s Gimmie a Light, but her take on the subgenre rids it of grit and menace. Admittedly her current single, a collaboration with Central Cee called Did It First, features plenty of gunfire in time with the hard Jersey club beat, but the filtered vocal samples behind it are melancholy, even poignant. The synth line on the amazingly titled Think U the Shit (Fart) carries with it a memory of electro-infused 80s pop-R&B. When the backing tracks tend to the ominous – as on Phatt Butt or Plenty Sun – something about Ice Spice’s snotty humour lends their mood the air of a cartoon or video game.
Then there are the lyrics. You could decry them as disjointed and insubstantial, but that seems to be the point. “I wouldn’t consider myself a lyricist,” she has said, explaining that she never writes anything: she freestyles over the beat, then stitches together the most striking, “super simple” lines. Accordingly, her success isn’t founded on the deftness of her thought-provoking turn of phrase or the depth of what she has to say, but on her ability to create snappy lines that go viral: “She a baddie with her baddie friend”; “You thought I was feeling you?”. The word “Munch” is both the title of her breakthrough single and a swiftly adopted slang term for a largely useless man. Sometimes her lyrics cut out the middleman and simply adopt existing memes: Think U the Shit (Fart) comes from a years-old viral image of Super Mario smoking a joint with the caption: “Bitches be thinking they the shit, but they ain’t even the fart.”
It’s rap that clearly fits the moment, built for a world in which everything is mediated online, and Ice Spice’s debut album displays the strengths and drawbacks of her approach. If insubstantiality is the accusation, well, Y2K! is 23 minutes long and four of its tracks have previously been released as singles: its release brings with it a whole 15 minutes of new music. That said, it makes a virtue of its brevity. The tracks last just long enough to lodge in your brain, then end. Producer RiotUSA ensures everything comes packing a hook, and moreover he’s capable of generating viscerally exciting soundscapes, as on Bitch I’m Packin’, which alternately teems with grimy electronics and lapses into eerie sparseness.
And the album as a whole doesn’t hang around long enough to bore you, a distinct possibility given Ice Spice’s limitations as a rapper who sticks doggedly to one flow, one style of delivery. If you want rap to provide insight or unflinching street-level reportage, you’ve clearly come to the wrong place: you’re unlikely to find it on an album where everything from beefs to infidelities to the measuring of one’s celebrity is conducted online; on which no one ever seems to go outside, unless they’re traversing the distance between a front door and a people carrier. But funny, snotty, quotable lines abound: “Bitches stay on my Pauly D / Send ’em back home like the cab’s here”; “I’m Miss Poopie like I need a diaper”.
Wilfully trashy, brief and throwaway, Y2K! is unlikely to enter the pantheon of great rap albums. Ice Spice has enjoyed a rapid rise by chiming with the times, so you do wonder what’s going to happen to its author when times change. But the album succeeds on its own terms: it’s fun while it lasts. Whether that also proves to be a summation of Ice Spice’s career is a question left hanging.
This week Alexis listened to
King Hannah – New York, Let’s Do Nothing
I belatedly discovered King Hannah’s album via a friend’s best-of-2024-so-far playlist. New York, Let’s Do Nothing is fantastic: a witty, sharp, Courtney Barnett-esque paean to idling in Manhattan.
