PLAY ICE SPICE & CASH COBAIN

Ice Spice has already outlived any initially expected shelf-life. Following the impact of her viral 2022 hit “Munch,” she maintained momentum by rattling off a handful of excellent singles, a solid follow-up EP, and a feature on “Barbie World,” which closed the billion-dollar Barbie movie in 2023. Her full-length debut album, Y2K!, released in July, was met with casual derision and TikTok-fueled controversy, but none of that seemed to matter when I saw her perform live in August two weeks after its release. Instead, I witnessed a crowd of several thousand strong united in hearing their handful of favorite songs from an artist who has yet to see her charisma fade.

She’s remained unabashedly herself: a hard-nosed New York-drill rapper. Though the singular point of view of her earliest music is lacking on Y2K!, it also refuses to capitulate to a mainstream audience. It’s missing a blatant crossover attempt, even with appearances from Travis Scott and Gunna; it’s short and nasty; and “Did It First” is an instant all-timer. 

Casually dubbing herself “Ms. Poopie,” she loads Y2K! with scatological humor that was no doubt the reason so many children and families were at her headlining show at The Met. “Think you the shit/you not even a fart” exists on the razor’s edge between stupid and clever, and some of Y2K!’s songs fall into the former. But she brought the album’s caustic energy to a boisterous crowd diverse in race, age, gender, and, through my analysis of fits, devotion to rap music. Favorites like “Princess Diana,” “Deli,” and “In Ha Mood” went off the hardest and kept the crowd on its feet, and demonstrated the lack of connection to her new material.

Pairing Ice Spice with “sexy” drill rapper and producer Cash Cobain was a shrewd choice—it’s what got me in the door (alongside $10 tickets spotted hours before the show, a comment on the state of concert-going and major label acts who aren’t filling arena seats as expected). Cobain has been a favorite since he came on my radar in 2022, and “Fisherrr” and its Ice Spice-featuring remix, which was performed twice (first as the climax to Cobain’s solo set with Bay Swag, then together with all three at the climax of Ice Spice’s headlining set), was my song of the summer.

Rap shows lean too heavily on the DJ shouting “1, 2/1, 2, 3, 4” before every chorus and beat drop, cheating the audience out of real catharsis, but Cobain’s slinky productions euro-step such prodding. The Jai Paul-sampling “Rump'' boomed through the gaudy concert hall alongside early songs like “Jholiday” and “Vacant.” Some of my favorite Ice Spice songs gesture in this direction, like “Actin’ a Smoochie” (whose casual intensity erupted live) and especially “Did It First.” Even if the audience only responded to “Fisherrr” and “Rump Punch,” pairing the two artists was sensible. Joshua Minsoo-Kim called sexy drill the lovers’ rock of this decade, and his thesis hasn’t left my mind—in spite of the constant references to graphic sex acts, the load-bearing Jersey/Baltimore club beats and frothy samples that lean on quiet storm staples don’t scare the hoes, but create a canon of love songs that if you Magic Eye your focus code as seductive boutique music to set the mood. This is what I want out of future Ice Spice music, and would be a novel and not incongruous way out of her current malaise.

Her writing hasn’t risen to the occasion yet. The selections from Y2K! tended to blur together, but, mostly foregoing a backing vocal track, their bite was not lost in translation. The LED screen behind the stage flashed chromatic three-dimensional images of asses shaking alongside MAYA-esque YouTube 1.0 and AOL-inspired deep-fried internet iconography, invigorating imagery that would seem to demand more politically inspired art but is instead more like sprinkles on a dessert. (It is cool though.) That combined with power-walking through a two-story stage shaped like an MTA train imbued the performance with a musical theater touch that speaks to Ice Spice’s appeal to a wide swath of music fans, as well as the power of her camp appeal. That she can carry such a group of devotees could keep her in the c-suite of pop/rap music going forward, so long as she doesn’t continue to reveal so little of herself in the process.

Thanks to Logan Cryer and Mia Kang for shaping early drafts of this piece.

What I’m reading: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
Listening to: Charm
Watching: Stranger Than Paradise

Personal Notes:
I have three poems in the third Bullshit Lit Anthology. Bullshit Lit is a Philly-based publisher and imprint ran by Veronica Bennett. After reading at the book’s launch as one of eighteen readers, I felt at home. Physical copy available here; digital here.