By Alan C. Ventura
Lucki Eck$ is a name that I hadn’t thought about in a long, long time. That was up until early fall of this year when I came across his latest project, the first of which to achieve such mainstream success that I couldn’t ignore it. Now operating simply under the name LUCKI, the Chicago native landed himself on the Billboard charts with his newest release, FLAWLESS LIKE ME, and suffice to say, it’s not hard to fathom why given today’s hip-hop climate.
The end-product was, in a word, comatose.
FLAWLESS LIKE ME is a far cry removed from the lo-fi, high-density sound that LUCKI came to prominence with almost a decade ago through his early mixtapes and sporadic appearances on wax. There was a certain cold and hard-hitting energy to be felt in his floaty, almost lackadaisical rhyming style that seemed like it would’ve fit right into prime Odd Future—cemented doubly with his knack for collaborating with fellow sweethearts of the 2010s online rap community such as Danny Brown, Chance the Rapper, and OF’s own Earl Sweatshirt. On FLAWLESS LIKE ME, however, LUCKI has decided to forego his Alternative Trap roots in favor of something that is, at best, derivative and, at worst, unintelligible.
Bars about the artist pondering his own self-intoxication on the slurrily rapped “GEEKED N BLESSED” or wanting tattooed depictions of sex, money, and drugs on “KAPITOL DENIM”—perhaps the only song on the project where LUCKI displays a modicum of energy thanks no doubt to Future’s incomparably more captivating presence—litter a body of work that seemingly makes an active attempt to offer the listener nothing worth relistening to. By the time I got to the utterly incomprehensible “BEEN A MINUTE” less than ten minutes into this nearly hour-long slog, I became unsure as to whether I should feel rage, pity or second-hand embarrassment for LUCKI.
What pains me is the fact that I was genuinely excited to hear from LUCKI and see how this once young upstart had developed his own sound nine years later. Seeing how uninspired FLAWLESS LIKE ME truly was quickly made me realize that LUCKI doesn’t have his own sound; he’s only as good as the artists he mimes. With that, all that’s left to do is congratulate LUCKI on his newfound mainstream success and pray that the Codeine Cowboy can use that increased revenue to support him and his for as long as possible. I can wait.
