There’s an argument to be made that there’s a little more experimentalism in hip-hop today than there needs to be, but this isn’t to suggest that players going their own ways rather than standing beside the crowded talent pool in the mainstream is wrong. If you’re going to go it alone, you have to have more than just a concept; honestly, you have to have a set of God-given skills that can’t be taught in any school nor by any teacher, no matter how committed the pupil happens to be. Simply put, you’ve got to have a little bit of the unparalleled vibe Vikki Sota is rocking in “Run Up My Bands,” which despite being only his second is single is sounding like a true representation of personality typically reserved for later in an artist’s discography.
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The verses that comprise “Run Up My Bands” are admittedly pretty standard, conventional even (if you will), but what separates their sensibilities from those we would get out of a track from anybody on Spotify is the brutish delivery with which they’re offered up to the audience. Sota isn’t playing around with his words here; he’s getting right into the meat and potatoes of the emotional setting he wants to create with the music, and I like that his lyrics are essentially an extension of the melodic vibe much in the way I would expect them to be in a rock n’ roll single. It’s edgy, and not something anyone else is trying with any success at the moment.
Sota’s emotionality isn’t spilling all over the place, mind you. I think it’s quite evenly contained within the attitude he has at the microphone rather than in anything he’s actually saying to us. The lyrics aren’t made to invade us with their linguistic depth, but rather the manner in which they’re strung together – cosmetically crude and yet elegantly synchronized. It takes a lot more than an idea to make something as multilayered and straightforward as “Run Up My Bands” into a hit single, but you would really never be able to guess as much just by looking at how relatively easy it’s been for this rapper. He’s got the ‘it’ factor, and he’s using it to his advantage well here.
You can look far and wide for another artist like this one this fall, but I don’t believe you’re going to find many who have as acerbic an execution in the recording studio nor as much creative energy ready to be tapped into at any given moment. “Run Up My Bands” is contrast and color, but it’s also a very structured means of getting to know an artist who has more potential than most anyone around in his scene right now. Chukwudi Victor Otubelu isn’t your average post-millennium trap composer, but someone who wants to climb the artistic hierarchy with all of the integrity that comes with being truly on the independent side of this business. I respect him for it, and I think a lot of other critics will as well when they get their hands on a copy of Genesis this autumn.
Chadwick Easton