Smino, JID, and Kenny Beats. Obviously, Baguetti is a hit. But it’s more than that. From three of the more – with Smino being undoubtedly the most – experimental sources in hip-hop’s upper echelon, the track is also an exhibition of the ushering in of the zany and extravagantly absurd by the measure of wordplay in particular. Baguetti doesn’t sound like anything that existed just a decade ago, yet alone two or three. Instead, through the creative meandering of cadence and both rappers’ uncanny knack at squeezing any word into any bar or melody, Baguetti is a blueprint on how to merge the roots of hip-hop – lyrical poeticism & a rhythmically simple beat – with the many roads travelled and the many risks taken by all three artists involved.

 

For Smino and JID who began working together during the Revenge of the Dreamers camp sessions, the single is just the latest reiteration that this still-young, still-emerging hip-hop generation of daring risk takers has found at least two of its most creatively liberal leaders.

 

Coming on the heels of Smino’s She Already Decided mixtape – a classic by any epoch’s gauge – it seems especially obvious that the Chi-Louis transcendentalist is one of music’s most key futurist artists.