How Future Took Over Rap in 2015

Nobody laughs like Future. That isn’t to say he has a unique and specific laugh. It means his laugh on wax does not register as a human laugh at all. It’s a performative moan in the shape of laughter he pushes out as a mood setter on some of his greatest/saddest songs.

It’s the sound that marked a sea change in Future’s music a decade ago, when he dropped his masterpiece DS2. It signaled his shift from nomadic rap mutant to the crown prince of nihilistic nightlife darkness, an evolution that would catapult him from the marginal, bizarre intersection of mixtape and internet nerd rap to an Artist of the Decade contender.

The narrative is, by now, canon: Future is an accomplished rapper and singer who speaks exclusively through digital modulation and wracks up all the right cosigns early. He births a few hits off his torrent of releases, and by 2012 has garnered adequate buzz to warrant a major-label debut.

But please disregard the hindsight and retconning. Many of the people who today will claim Honest is and always has been a stone-cold classic had doubts. There was skepticism in regard to the filter, the soul-bearing lullabies pressed up against the skeletal coke rap, and questions as to whether Future would be able to tie these threads into a singular identity.

His journey toward cohesion began in the wake of that album and lasted through 2015. Future was 31 for most of the year, a moment when many of us settle into what our lives will be. He turned his own arc into fuel made of pain, tilting our perspective on the shit rappers have been bragging about since the beginning of the medium. He made money and sex and fame seem sad and pathetic and empty and hollow in ways not even Drake could and cast a transcendent gloom over the landscape.

Future's evolution culminated in DS2, perhaps his most celebrated body of work. Today, instead of a retrospective on that release, I’ll be isolating the moments, concepts, strategies, techniques, and collaborators that changed Future’s music and, by extension, all of rap, and highlighting the songs that best illustrate them.

So, in the parlance of a Simpsons clip show, let’s travel back to 2015. As Future himself suggests, it was indeed a time to be alive.

Dumped by Ciara

Best expressed by: “March Madness” (but take your pick—there are elements of it in every song)

A brief recap of one of the most heavily covered celebrity gossip stories of the 2010s: Over a two-year span beginning in 2012, Future dates the pop star Ciara. They get engaged and have a child named Future. He is allegedly unfaithful in very noisy rumors, and by 2014 they are very messily and publicly separated.

This is the inciting incident, the mortal wound that caused the bad break in Future’s music, which, to be clear, was never exactly cheery. Ciara releases the song “I Bet” in January 2015, a breakup ballad aimed at Future. This would haunt Future’s 2015 output and much that came after.

Like, for example, 56 Nights’ “March Madness,” one of the greatest songs Future made that year. It is in the shape of any number of celebratory “luxury and women” anthems from this era, but it’s tinged with a terrible sadness, conveyed through the production, through the quiver in Future’s voice, and through seeming throwaway lines like, “I didn’t want to fuck the bitch / The molly made me fuck her even though she average.”

Reset is necessary

Best expressed by: “Kno the Meaning”

In late November 2014, Future closes out a monthlong European tour by flying to Abu Dhabi with his producer and longtime DJ, Esco, to play the United Arab Emirates Grand Prix. In the airport, through a nightmarish series of events, Esco gets all the bags for the entourage checked by airport cops with the understanding that they’re in his possession, and eventually weed is discovered, which leads to 56 days in a Dubai prison, through the end of January.

“Kno the Meaning” is part of the deluxe release of DS2 and lays this all out in detail. Riding high off the Monster hype, Future makes Beast Mode, a brief album that sounds like an unburdened artist regrouping and starting clean, with a clearer idea of who he is and what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.

Zaytoven is a perfect producer for you

Best expressed by: “Peacoat”

Since we’ve brought up Zay and Beast Mode, let’s briefly discuss what made the rapper and producer such great partners. Zaytoven had been working with Future since the beginning, as part of a cohort that included the likes of Will A Fool, Mercy, and DJ Spinz, among many others. But this relationship culminated in Beast Mode (and a 2018 sequel), in which Zay handled the entirety of production duties for an original mixtape, which was novel for that era. This approach produced their best work together because of the sustained mood and mind-meld you get from tag-teaming a whole project. Future’s revamped flow is also perfect for Zay’s style, the arpeggios, the ruminative, key-stroke-rich articulated riffs combined with the Mike Will Made-It-era stomp and those bleak synth melodies.

Refining his flow

Best expressed by: “Trap N*****”

One of the most crucial, noticeable changes in Future’s music, from Honest to 2015 is Future’s flow, which is completely rebuilt to the point that, if it weren't for his voice, you could mistake 2015 Future for an entirely different rapper.

On most of Honest, when he’s not crooning, Future’s raps are shouted in these clipped, flabby couplets that serve primarily as pure energy. It’s all generic coke rap, money, and women talk that is catchy as hell but leaves little impression. This is a stark contrast to the rapper he evolves into just a few months later on songs like “Trap N*****.” Future is a drilled-down, laser-focused-cadence rapper who lives in the pocket. It’s the perfect delivery system for his new, dense, fucked-up reflections and confessions he will sneak by you with his punchlines if you’re not leaning in and paying attention.

Locating his tone

Best expressed by: “Thought it Was a Drought”

DS2 opens with taking sacrament, the body and the blood. A cube of ice clinks in a diamond-cut rocks glass, the promethazine is poured over it, the carbonated lemon-lime soda sizzles as it hits the cube, the drink is stirred, a blunt is rolled and sparked and hit, all over Metro Boomin’s morose, sinister synths.

Here, on the major-label follow up to Honest, it’s Future consecrating what the mixtape work had been building towards: an energy, a tone, a vibe, that was nearly exclusively serious and bleak even when looking out at a club full of women, or a table piled with drugs and money, or the small of your girl’s back as he stands behind her in $300 slides.

Rapping/Singing

Best expressed by: “I Serve the Base”

On early projects, Future would treat the rapping and singing as a LeBron and Luka, your turn/my turn proposition, which would confuse and/or bother some rock-centric critics in a pre-streaming era. One of Future’s main innovations as an artist, in form, not function, is solving the issues of dissonance within his projects by breaking them apart. “I Serve the Bass” is the kind of raw, spare, lyrical showcase that characterized much of what he released in 2015.

Less is more…

Best expressed by: “Diamonds From Africa”

There are 10 features on Honest and somewhere in the vicinity of 15 credited producers. One of Future’s key insights in 2015 is making his circle extremely small, working with about five producers who are all very aligned sonically, and, with one notable exception, and there are no features. It creates a simplification of sound for a melodic genius with an endless bag, and shorter songs that aren’t muddled by the noise or input of other voices. It allows for miracles like “Diamonds From Africa”, a beautiful, odd, spiraling, repetitious, howling Quran recitation, a breakout solo performance that could’ve been ruined by clutter.

…Except when Drake is involved

Best expressed by: “Diamonds Dancing”

According to Future, the mandate to keep his 2015 projects featureless came from DJ Esco, who added the provision, “Unless Drake wants to get on DS2’s ‘Where Ya At’” which is precisely what happened. In retrospect, Future and Drake were something of a marriage of convenience. Both were ahead of the curve as genre-blending raconteurs molded in the image of 808s & Heartbreak. Drake had a larger share of the pop market, but Future lent credibility.

A few of their early efforts were outstanding, for the most part, it was a mixed bag, a less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts proposition from two geniuses at the peak of their powers who often either sounded compromised or completely detached from their work together. “Diamonds Dancing” remains their collective masterpiece and the best song they will apparently ever make together, a perfect distillation of their shared “Sad Guy in the Club” aesthetic.

Metro Boomin is also a perfect producer for you

Best expressed by: “Freak Hoe”

“Freak Hoe” is an exemplar of what a perfect match Metro and Future would be, because it’s a song called “Freak Hoe” that sounds like a blend of an emotional X-Files episode and a blood-soaked montage at the end of The Godfather. It’s gorgeous layered, and dramatic, the kind of beat made by a producer you could imagine soundtracking a moody masterpiece of computer animation in eight years.

Taking the pain and running with it

Best expressed by “No Basic”/“Slave Master”

Future is obviously far from the first emo rapper, but there have been few rappers as adept at making the ways they flee from their problems as interesting and relatable as the problems themselves. It’s Gatsby on pills, recast to reflect our detached, drug-addled, postmodern condition. In Future’s hands, in 2015, the shit that rappers had casually been bragging about for decades was transformed, becoming the transparent crutches of a broken man. This was the birth of Future as the mascot and meme for thirsty toxic masculinity, looking for any excuse to reach out to his ex via text, chasing pain with more pain.

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