#6 - osquinn - "and most importantly, have fun" / "from paris, with love" (tie)

Dec 18, 2021

Quinn is a voracious sampler with a peripatetic appetite. She’s flown back to the 70s to snag Cortex’s groovy “Huit octobre 1971,” vaulted to the aughts to flip Frou Frou’s yearning “A New Kind of Love” into a chittering jungle track, reworked ScHoolboy Q’s “Hands On The Wheel” into glitch-rap, and adapted Azealia Banks’ “212” into a sun-kissed beat. She even covered the goofy early internet meme “The Duck Song” and added trap drums. Equally skilled at cratedigging and banger-building, the 17-year-old musician knows what samples to pluck and how to twist them into something inventive and addictive.

Maybe my favorite is “and most importantly, have fun.” The lick is Kris Kross’ “Jump,” an instant beam to the ‘90s, which itself samples Ohio Players’ 1972 “Funky Worm.” Quinn weaves the track’s whinnying funk synth into a breakbeat typhoon, the riff chopping in and out like a turntable needle skipping anxiously. The song’s manic pulse works as a kind of metaphor for the fury and fear Quinn seems to feel about parasocial relationships, how it makes her pissed that people think they get her when all they see is the exterior she presents to the public. You can sense the coiled-up rage and sly confidence in her voice, as someone who has been very vocal about the harassment and hate she’s faced online, when she declares, “you don’t even know me, you don’t even know me” in the intro. There’s no build-up, no slow crawl to a bass drop — just full-throttle from the get-go, the beat convulsing like a rattlesnake as Quinn spins and swerves over it with alliterative bounce (“barefoot in the blue Ford Focus”) and frantic energy.

My other favorite of hers this year, “from paris, with love,” twitches with angsty vigor that grows increasingly unstable. The beat starts off at a controlled tempo, akin to something she might have rapped over last year when she first blew up. But Quinn’s menacing threats and taunts — “you gon’ have to kill me if you want me… you can’t kill me if you tried to, and I know that makes you mad” — offer a tease of the aural warfare to come. Midway through, a wave of electronic noise smacks you in the face. The soundscape slowly starts to buckle and disintegrate under the pressure of glitches and mounting bass blasts. Suddenly, Quinn’s voice completely vanishes and the instrumental morphs into an aural Ganondorf lurching recklessly and spitting globs of low-end. Chaos engulfs everything. The final 30 seconds is practically a firestorm of radioactive synth explosions.

Check out osquinn:

https://soundcloud.com/p4rkr

https://soundcloud.com/catmom4

The list:

#20 - aya - "what if i should fall asleep and slipp under" and "Emley lights us moor"

#19 - rrodney - Jersey club remix of Trippie Redd ft. Playboi Carti’s “Miss the Rage”

#18 - aghast - “thas wut i do” (prod. lungskull & wavebird)

#17 - Yves Tumor - “Secrecy Is Incredibly Important To The Both of Them”

#16 - kaystrueno - “PRETTY B!TCHES NEVA DIE”

#15 - kurtains - “spawn”

#14 - Ecco2k - “PXE”

#13 - vertigoaway ft. schizoscriptures - “Break This The Breaking Point 2”