Review Summary: The purple haze gets thicker.
If we are to take his verses as canon, Future Hendrix is a machine. He drinks, smokes, snorts and fucks through a haze of lean, utterly disregarding any of the repercussions that might occur as a result of his singular drive for success in its most hedonistic forms. Indeed, his modus operandi is the one thing that he makes fully clear in this foggy, glorious mess of an album. We find it out almost immediately, of course - after the cartoonishly evil chimes and bells that introduce the album’s first track, “Thought It Was a Drought,” Future presents a hook that’s as much mission statement as state-of-the-union address. “I just f
ucked your b
itch in some Gucci flip-flops,” he boasts. “I just took a piss and I seen codeine coming out.”
Anything and everything exists in Future’s domain, it seems. It doesn’t matter the putative “owner,” it doesn’t matter the abstractness or intangibility - if it exists, and it can be tied into some form of pleasure or power, Future will take control of it. He makes this pretty clear on “I Serve The Base,” where he rattles off all the things he has in his possession at that moment: drank, money, molly, “stick” (the latter of these most likely a metaphorical expression of his power, though it’s also possible that there’s a thread of sexual prowess woven in here - which, if you want to go there, is also kind of an expression of dominance if you try hard enough). The title furthers this expression of sheer control - Future “serves the base,” referring to his dedication to cocaine, his buyers, and/or his listeners, the very things and people who will help him maintain his position.
Going beyond the Genius annotations (at the time of writing, at least), though, the title of “I Serve The Base” can also be read as Hendrix peeling back the layers of the figurative onion that is his public persona. He “serves the base” - that is, he embodies and is beholden to the whims of the hedonism in which he revels. The “base” - the vulgar, the immediate - is everything to Future, but it almost feels like he’s starting to feel some of the backlash that his life will inevitably inflict on any of its devotees. And even though this interpretation might be pushing it just a little, it would help to explain why Metro Boomin’s beat is so panicky and abrasive, something off of some godforsaken alternate version of
Yeezus where Kanye’s drug of choice was codeine instead of narcissism. It’s scared and adrenaline-stuffed, so incredibly unlike Future’s verbal boasts that it’s tough to figure out how the hell his aggressive Auto-Tune met a beat which shrinks away from his vocals so noticeably.
The most obvious piece of outside context relevant here is likely “Slave Master.” In between bragging about his jewelry and his cars (the “slave master” bit seems to be a play on calling a car a “whip,” and it doesn’t really seem like this bit represents larger commentary on anything), Hendrix comes out of his lean-induced stupor just long enough to take stock of where he’s come to and where he’s going. “Long live A$AP Yams, I’m on that codeine right now,” he muses. Though it’s most likely he’s saying he’s memorializing Yams, who died by drug overdose, by continuing the time-honored tradition of partaking in their substance of choice, there’s a more sinister undertone at play here. It’s possible that Future is not saying he’ll allow A$AP Yams to live on within him in his cup of lean. Rather, it’s possible that Future is realizing that he’s doing precisely what Yams did that led to his tragic demise, and that he’s suddenly realized he might be the drug’s next casualty. He’s “do[ing] it for the n
iggas who gone,” maybe, but he’s also doing it because he “disguise[s] pain when [he] make[s] it rain.” He’s drowning his sorrows in drank, and no matter (or, perhaps, because of) how much he rationalizes his use of the substance in terms of those who have been felled by its potency, he could be the next one gone too soon - and it seems like he knows it.
Seen this way,
DS2 is an affirmation of self and self’s means in part, but it’s also an inflection point at which Future is starting to think he’s going too fast even as he continues to hammer the gas. It’s why the instrumentals are so torpid and waterlogged, plodding along even as Hendrix goes as hard as he can. It’s why the lone feature - Drake on “Where Ya At” - is so out of place, as Drake’s cocksure, almost lazy bravado strips the song’s overbearing cloudiness of all its power. Most visibly, though, it’s why Hendrix finally breaks from his ethos of total dominance on closing track “Blood on the Money.” Over the ghostly croon of a syrupy synth, Future finally manages to put on the brakes. “They got blood on the money and I still count it / I can't help the way I'm raised up / That Easter Pink, I tried to give it up, I can't give it up,” he says. It’s a dream life he’s living, and he knows it. And if there’s anything he’s learned, it’s that dreams can’t last forever.
