Chow Lee is confronted by a lover on “Practice!,” a standout track from the New York rapper’s 12th full-length project in half as many years. She claims that Lee “talks about pussy in all of [his] songs”—and she’s not lying. Because if you’ve heard of Chow, then you know that he can’t stop yapping about his seemingly inexhaustible sexual appetite. And that he does on the delightful and hilarious Sex Drive, which serves as a devotional text—a shrine really—to bushy vaginas, non-monogamy, and eating ass.
They call him “Mr. Vagina,” Chow says on “Swag It!,” “not ’cause I’m pussy but because I know that pussy like inside and outside.” If you can’t relate to his obsessive horndoggery, it doesn’t really matter, because any topic that inspires a wordsmith to bounce around so energetically, launching from one feverishly relayed description to the next, is one worth celebrating.
Along with Cash Cobain, Chow is one of the foremost progenitors of the sexy drill subgenre, which takes the shifty, nonlinear rhythmic patter of drill and suffuses it with a more seductive atmosphere. A certain freneticism is one of the chief joys of Sex Drive, in part due to the breathless clip of Chow’s delivery. Each song feeds into the next, with little verbal call-outs to the following track before the current one is even over. But the “sexy” part of the album’s sexy drill categorization means that it’s content to smolder; the music is as influenced by ’90s R&B as it is by the modern club music from which it pulls its brisk drum patterns and throbbing bass.
Chow’s narrator isn’t quite as much of a dog as he first comes off. As the album nears its midpoint, his single-minded front begins to thaw. On “U Got Fans!,” he admits, “I want your mind, body, and soul,” while on “Tequila Vacay,” he swears that he makes eye contact when his girl rides him. But “LSD” marks a real planting of the flag for Chow’s emotional maturity, as he sets his carnal desires aside, assuring his lover, “I’m tryna do this right and make you my wife.”
Cash is more well-known as the face of the sexy drill scene, but Sex Drive makes clear that he’s a more natural fit in the producer’s chair. He provides a pair of lustrous beats for back-to-back tracks “Sleepy & Sheff” and “Act Bad Twin!,” complete with pickled vocal samples and fizzy hi-hats. They’re outright mood pieces, with the latter utilizing a PartyNextDoor sample to ingenious effect, but Chow’s quick-to-the-draw witticisms clinch the deal. Together, Chow and Cash are prophets of the prurient, though their approach makes the filth pure.
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