There is no such self-consciousness on DS2.
But he remained visibly uncomfortable in the spotlight, stepping out in matching designer with Ciara like Atlanta’s begrudging Montague. The cruel irony is that Future was great at being a pop star, at least in a mercenary sense Pluto, with its glossy ballads about looking for love with a flashlight, remains one of the best major label rap debuts of the last five years. That pivot from hero to villain is the album’s central conceit, the culmination of the journey from Monster’s wounded hedonism to the numb howl of 56 Nights. "Tried to make me a pop star, and they made a monster," Future snarls on "I Serve the Base", a skuzzy, fiendish track that busts down DS2’s doors early, its Metro Boomin beat built around what sounds like a sacrificial lamb’s last minutes of life. "I think I lost my heartbeat for a second and a half," he chanted dispassionately on the title track of Dirty Sprite, the 2011 mixtape to which DS2 nods with its title. He was caught between dissonant identities: the wide-screen romantic who made songs with Miley Cyrus, and the hustler from Little Mexico, Zone 6, who flirted with death on record. But it was no coincidence that it saw Future learning to empathize with his partner by literally becoming her, projecting himself onto her being (compare it to the similarly-titled but far less resonant bonus track "I’ll Be Yours").
The album’s emotional nucleus was "I Be U", the ex-romantic’s most stunning love song to date. It was obvious Future was being tugged in too many directions at once: the sledgehammer street bangers, the poignant lone ranger ballads, the big-name collabs with Kanye and Pharrell. But Honest wasn’t a bad album by any means it was just confused. There’s been a backlash against sophomore album Honest in the past year-even Future has distanced himself from the project, which he released before the ugly demise of his relationship with ex-fiancée Ciara. The stars have never been more uncannily aligned for the man born Nayvadius Wilburn, the reigning king of Atlanta who’s deployed a trilogy of album-quality mixtapes since last October to recapture some of the goodwill lost as he’s figured out what kind of artist he wanted to be over the past three years. It’s not just an apt parallel for the rapper, who named his expectation-defying debut after the misunderstood planet: it’s the ultimate symbol for the latest and most relevant phase of Future’s career. Its data has been revealing the dwarf planet as an icy, complicated world, still in geological flux, marked by a bright, heart-shaped feature in the center of much darker terrain. The same week Future announced the release date for Dirty Sprite 2, his third official retail release, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto.
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