on bryson tiller's "ciao!"

 

I sent some year-end stuff in for Tone Glow once again, but wanted to take a moment to write about my SOTY.

This song is so ridiculous. I am a big fan of weird approaches to lyric-writing as the engine for weird new song forms, and this is a perfect example of that, sounding like it was punched in in five minutes once Bryson came up with the hook. The central idea: comparing a woman's use of Bryson's time to free trials/mail-order delivery, and the mixed feelings (excitement, then frustration, then acceptance) that both inspire. He starts off already going further than he wanted to (a "two-day trial" becomes a "thirty-day trial") ,then adds another 'face card'/greeting card/credit card bit, and pushes into Drake slam poetry territory ("took a month to make it to my lobby, it can't be Prime"? Come on dude).  

The metaphors are so awkwardly over-extended that it almost feels like a song that was written in a second language and then translated into English, except so much of how the humor lands, how it sounds (like "trial" rhyming with "ciao")¹, relies on Bryson's particular intuition for the shape of his own voice. Every line is a goofy Instagram caption sold with unmistakable conviction ("trials and tribulations!!!!", in case you didn't get sick of the wordplay already.) It's an R&B song over a drill beat but it's not at all the sound of the moment 'sexy drill', with that spacey endless-scroll affect (which a lot of Bryson's earlier stuff helped inspire)—this is a real-deal R&B song, selling its ridiculous ideas with over-the-top passion instead of unfazed cool. Every time you listen to it you can pick a new vocal part to sing for a few seconds before bursting out laughing. Produced by Leon Thomas (of Andre from Victorious! and Ariana Grande fame), the beat is crisp and polished in an almost vintage-R&B way, with lots of space for the runs in the back, and even breaks down into some juke territory, which makes the whole thing even funnier/more fun. This is exactly the kind of laughing-at-yourself excess you feel when you make a bad romantic or financial decision. It's one long bad joke until the horns come in, heralding how good the joke is.

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¹ I didn't even mention "eating lo mein it's chow for now, chow chow" or the like 4 other dumb one-liners that try to do extra wordplay. It never ends.