There is a modest narrative to BAFK, which Nettspend tries to wrap up within the first 15 seconds. “It get weird growing up,” he gargles on the intro (it’s called “Growing Up”) over footwork-y percussion and synth sounds that do sort of channel Purpose-era Bieber. “I’m still a lil’ bit childish… But I ain’t no child, bitch,” he squeals in AutoTune on “Tyla,” whose giddy lurch is plainly modeled after Chief Keef, as are blatant Sosa-isms like, “I might get a tutor, just to fuck the tutor.” There are even a few gestures to the fact that he has parents, though they mostly seem to interact by phone. Perhaps at the behest of some executive or other, Nett was told that an album needs a hook, so here it is: the story of a kid coming up in this crazy world, one that’s almost condescending in its attempt at linear logic.
But in the album’s middle stretch between “A$AP” and “Beach leak,” something clicks. Over a Jersey club mirage of an EvilGiane beat, Nettspend begins the latter with a couplet that says it all in seven words: “Drugs in my drink/I fell asleep.” An inexplicably hilarious Grimes sample on “Skipping Class”—a lantern to guide the odd millennial listener down BAFK’s dark path—makes a poignant backdrop for a scene where the decision to part ways with a fellow truant (“Yeah, I’m done skipping class with you”) hits harder than the album’s many forced Peter Pan-isms. There is dizzy pleasure in the way the vowels roll off the tongue on an otherwise dumb line like “I just chucked a couple bands at a dancer,” or the imagery Nett conjures later on “F*CK CANCER” of a couple thousand pennies tossed into a wishing well, before a sickening off-hand remark (“I just popped two pills, hope it don’t fuck me over”) startles you back from the dream.
Maybe you’re old enough to remember when critics called Young Thug “post-verbal” and wondered whether Chief Keef was possibly autistic, or when the slur of “mumble rap” was weaponized in earnest—quaint reminders of the instinct to reject the new and strange. But I’m not sold on the idea that this delirious, dissociative, nihilistic music, which is hard to even think about in normal songwriting terms, is representative of the New Youth Sound of Today. (When I asked a friend’s teenage kid if his classmates listened to Nettspend, he responded with an eye-roll: “That’s like, for emo kids who want to be mysterious.”) Still, it resonates when Nett encrypts his own language (“We both got a lot to say/Speaking in codes ‘cause they might listen to us,” he warbles on “A$AP”) or grapples with the limits of aura (“I try to explain how I feel, but I just feel it in my core,” from “Tommy”) or on “F*CK CANCER,” when he wonders, “What is real?” Nothing, basically. Next question.
