8088i / CoffeeBlack: “my cat likes you”

Detroit producer CoffeeBlack is on his third straight collab album—Love at First Sight? with WTM Scoob, No Fakin with Wan Go, and now Knowledge Thru Friends with 8088i—that sounds as if it were born out of the kind of improvisatory jam session that you can always count on seeing in a music biopic. Of course I don’t believe Dr. Dre spontaneously busted out the “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” keyboard riff at the same time Snoop happened to walk down the stairs and freestyle on command as Straight Outta Compton suggests, but I would buy that 8088i’s vapor-thin hums and motormouthed cloud raps were created in the spur of the moment. That’s the dreamy vibe of “my cat likes you”: 8088i ping-pongs between half-thoughts as CoffeeBlack’s mellow beat—which sort of takes me back to the lumbering soul of May God Bless Your Hustle—goes through a whole series of spontaneous pitch shifts. Here’s my vision of how the scene would play out in the movie: One friend hangs around smoking too much weed and keeps falling asleep on the tempo knob, and the other friend is mad until they listen back and realize they’re onto something. Cue montage.