But even compared to a writer like Faiyaz, Cash and Chow are slightly less chill. For one, they’re nastier. Sex isn’t ever vaguely alluded to—it’s always laid out in vivid detail. “Girl you look good, let me taste it/I’ll have you cumming and squirting and shaking,” Cash softly sings on “Vacant.” Also, they’re messier. On “Wavy Lady 2,” Cash sweet talks this girl he’s feeling by wailing about how he wants to give her a baby. (It’s fair to assume he took that pledge back the next morning.) And when they fall for someone, they get so turned-on that they might as well start barking like Will Smith in the Fresh Prince. “I wanna fight your father, nigga who her daddy?” is Chow’s reaction to spotting a fine-ass woman on “JHoliday2.”
The bed-hopping tales are made even more distinctive since they’re surrounded by uptempo beats instead of moody, washed-out ones. The mixtape’s production is a kinetic fusion of sample-drill and Jersey club, produced by Cash Cobain and a few outside contributors. Cash was raised in the Bronx but adopted by Queens, where his beats for local rappers Shawny Binladen, Big Yaya, and Flee were some of the earliest in NYC to reimagine popular songs of the past through the lens of drill.
These days, that sound has been run into the ground, but Cash and company still do it well because even though there are recognizable samples on 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy—“Hey There Delilah,” “I’m on One,” “Corazon Sin Cara”—the draw isn’t nostalgic but rather how its reinterpreted into something new. Not all the samples click: The Chris Brown “Like a Virgin Again” flip is too on-the-nose and the Fergie rework is played-out. Generally, though, it seems like Cash could cut up your cousin’s grainy-ass SoundCloud upload, garnish it with stuttering drums and bed squeaks, and turn it into gold.
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What gives the mixtape another boost is that Cash and Chow’s sex and Henny-fueled voyage through the city feels rooted in everyday reality and not just the life of celebrity. Whether it’s Cash and the girl he’s with saying they hate each other (and still going home together), or the New York specificity of their stories, like when Chow brings a girl on a date to the Williamsburg fusion restaurant New Apolo with his only intention being to get her in his bed. Real-life mess is way more fun.
We need to talk about that absolutely wild Nardo Wick needle drop in Elvis
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is more than two-and-a-half hours of breakneck insanity—it gives off the same adrenaline rush as hitting three figures on the speedometer. I kind of loved it. As the movie slows down toward the end, Baz’s Elvis love turns into worship. Oh, if you were wondering why Elvis cheated on his wife (Baz glosses over the fact that he married her while she was a teenager), it was because he loved her too much. Oh, if you were wondering what reunited the nation after the assassinations of MLK and RFK in the late ’60s, it was some shitty Elvis “protest” song. Besides all that, the most batshit moment of the movie was the song that plays in the closing credits. Spoiler alert: The movie ends with Elvis’ death, and as the credits roll they go into his infamous 1969 hit “In the Ghetto,” an overblown ballad about the cycle of inner city poverty, but remixed by Jacksonville, Florida rapper Nardo Wick as “Product of the Ghetto.”
