Miguelito is a senior reporter at Stone Turntable.
One of the feats of GTA V is the way it fills out a compressed abstraction of Los Angeles County. There’s resemblance to the general shape and flow of the city, yet the fine details become wispy approximations as if in a dream. The bathrooms at Echo Park are angled perfectly but set too far from the street and the script of the Lennox car wash sign is in the right font but too small. Hollywood Park Casino is a couple blocks from the Chinese Theater rather than in Inglewood. Satirical DJs litigate culture wars—think lowbrow versions of the “gender fluid illegals are entering the country twice” line in Succession’s opening credits—the influence of defense contractors on the political economy of Southern California is on-the-nose (missile strikes land every other block, you can customize their smoke color) and the player’s phone won’t stop buzzing with offers to “Earn 2x $ & XP on Lamar’s Smoke Out Adversary Mode.” The game has stretched beyond the conditions that informed it in 2013.
Lunchbox, the aqueous and innovative New York rapper, floods his music with this same material, to the point of creating songs that can’t hold their own volume. He saturates his tracks and tests their load-bearing capacity with augmented melodies and vocal tricks. Like GTA, the form of his source material is recognizable, but the scale is altered. The music leaks over the boundaries of the song.
There are two different songs called “Gta” on his newest project, L.B. Cooper. It’s a lean offering from the Harlem native that maintains his prominence in the “post-”, sometimes “anti-”, regional miasma of avant-garde internet rap. “Gta” and “Gta 2/ Eta” capture the surreal landscape of Los Santos—and the sensation of zipping across real-life highways that demand a definite article—just at two different speeds. That’s lower on his priorities though.
Lunchbox offers sketches. “Sketches” might even imply more definition than his songs claim. It’s more like watching someone leave a message in a puddle of wax that won’t cool. You get the symbols at the moment of creation. They’re legible and intense, then dissolve and the syntax is untraceable. Lunchbox’s music has a polarized depth. Routine infatuation has him thinking he’s “in love with the drugs” on “Luv.” “Thrill” can’t help but lean on its inversion, “pain,” in the opening “So Not Me.” Whatever he pins down while recording is preserved in full exaggeration. “Maroon 5” doesn’t gesture toward paranoia, it says “which one of you?!?” while doing donuts around the room looking for the responsible party.
Similar contemporary forces (Yeat, Ken Carson, the decapitated flourishes of 2010s Lil Uzi) are effective at the first intrusion but can’t sustain attention the way Lunchbox can. The mood can be uncertain, ostentatious, condescending or timidly sincere, you want to see where it goes.
Lunchbox’s appeal is intimately tied to his perspicacious ear. Five solo projects have distanced him from what first made his profile bubble—producing for Sheck Wes back in 2018—but are still associated with a maximalist sonic ecosystem. His working relationship with producers amir.pr0d, Chromes, Mowz, and their associated cohort is vital to the formula.
Chromes has been elastic since “Silly Silly” from Lunchbox’s New Jazz and brings the same movement to L.B. Cooper’s “Goin Bad,” which almost gives haptic feedback when he mentions his “movement.” Amir makes “Nothing Gone Last” sound like being turned into a pillar of diamonds instead of salt, a change from his more harrowing reputation. Elsewhere he’ll add a hiss in the background (“Gta”) that mimics a valve releasing the pressure of all the tension Lunchbox and co. summon.
It’s tempting to say the beat is the dynamic force of a Lunchbox track, but his vocal speculation leans well against the production experiments. He can stir up a wayward inflection or create a pocket ex nihilo and flexes those abilities on “Bilingualll,” the project’s most imaginative moment. After playing with the prefix “bi-” for a couple bars, he says his racks are “o-ffi-cial like U.S. Open.” The only thing missing is the pop of the tennis ball can. Extraneous melodies and drum patterns appear for about 12 seconds and then the beat settles back down as Lunch tells us the off-white LaFerrari looks like “milk in the distance.”
He might gently resist the phrase, but “new jazz” functions well to describe the liquid dissonance of Lunchbox’s music. He said in a tweet from last month “The new jazz shit funny asf cause we was just havin fun wit the homies and fucking around callin it jazz and that shit took off before we could even realize the joke wasn’t funny no more shit got real.” Good jokes stick.
The pacing of his albums reward a complete listen. The sharp cuts, offset transitions and jarring openings become events you anticipate as much as the way he throws his voice around or the production components. Lunchbox’s albums have an internal logic that you’re encouraged to tease out and ride with the same way purists say you should enjoy the watermark moments of “old jazz.” As you move through his sequencing it develops the character of a car transmission, able to shift its speed according to the driver’s opaque purpose. We’re only riding shotgun.
If one complaint can be sent toward L.B. Cooper it’s that you want to follow its path further than it leads you. It’s only 25 minutes and doesn’t give itself time to breathe the way Lunchtime. or New Jazz did. His sketches are so transparent, they make you want to see every style collected together at once. On “Act Like U Kno,” the middle point L.B. Cooper, Lunchbox whispers out “look at what I just made today,” presumably talking about how his bank account went up in the last 24 hours. It’s better to take that as a cue on how to sit with his improvisations. He’s enamored by what he conjured up today, the music from that chunk of time more resounding than anything in its lane.
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