The inflection of the singing evolves again, too. One guitar retains its rug-a-chug as another slices atop the bass with the insinuating sex of a back-seat blues. He’s going in.Ī third shift to the rescue: the bridge. And at this point in “Boomer,” he is singing that he’s “goin’ in.” Wait, you might think, back into his private grave of shame or doubt or embarrassment? Is this vibrant, vital voice that has been riding shag-carpet guitar amid a nimbus of ooooooohs - is that voice really, really going to rebury itself and try in the next verse and chorus for disinterment? Nope. He sounds, he sounds - what’s the word? Exhumed. Sure enough, another shift: a chorus-chorus, one whose words slide across the notes so that the dude singing the double “I” that starts it sounds more than free. The trip through the live wires of “most people” and their stupid expectations: He’s about to burst from the checked box of Black creative expression - right here in the pre-chorus!
I knew instantly this person was American. Most people gonna smoke what they wanna smokeĪnd others, they don’t care about no other thingsĪnd sometimes, it’s kinda hard to tell exactly where I wanna go I, I know most people gonna say what they wanna say But then I got here, to this scene change: The ease of lingo, the casual, unselfconscious rock ’n’ roll swagger in time with hip-hop’s lean: a brilliant ploy of joshing synthesis, perhaps. Up to now, I had assumed the person imparting this voltage was a Brit, a Black Brit. The song’s still charging, rumbling, but orderly, so that each word in this speeding caravan now has its own bunk.
The guitar heavies itself and goes chompchompchompchompchomp, a danger known from the metal of the ’80s.
The lyrics of the verses don’t get sang so much as slung. But the slurry cadences - those are rap’s. And the tumble of lyrics, something about how “I told my girl that I was working, that’s a lie - I’m in the trap.” Their delivery hails from beyond the garage - from a secret room beneath it, actually, where naked people weigh and package cocaine at Uzi-point. The garage rock of it was what got me - sun-on-water guitar, hopscotch drums. “Boomer” opens with the sort of male salutation - “Aye bruh, aye bruh, aye bruh” - that typically stokes my inner Travis Bickle. By the first bar, I’d gone from plank to prostrate. I was doing push-ups in my living room one pandemic morning when my favorite radio station hit me with a dart.