James Blake and Lil Yachty are a match made in buddy-comedy heaven. The British singer-songwriter and producer is the go-to white male out-of-genre vocalist selling silken hooks to the likes of Jay-Z, Ye, and Travis Scott, an unlikely outcome for an auteur responsible for the baroque pop and minimal dance music of his 2009 self-titled debut. Lil Yachty has a chip on his shoulder as the latest 20-something rapper dealing with unearned, unrealistic complaints about lowbrow trap music poisoning the well for the more polished craftsmen in the genre, but the purists’ outrage hasn’t stemmed a tide of breezy hits, solid guest features, and writing and production jobs for the Migos and Drake.
Bad Cameo , an album-length collab between Blake and Yachty, sees the duo matching wits over heady, reverb-drenched hip-hop and electronic-music hybrids, which nudge each artist into a more intriguing creative space. Working together pushes Lil Yachty further from the southern and Midwest rap trends set or else savvily stalked on his Lil Boat and Michigan Boat Boy mixtapes, building on the left-field genre spelunking that took place across last year’s divisive psych-rock and funk pivot, Let’s Start Here . It also turns the page on a dicey stretch of Blake news: He struggled in March to explain how Vault, a subscription service he had pushed as a “nice solution” to streaming platforms’ meager payouts, differs from the preexisting utilities and then caught smoke in June for admitting.
