His music, where any specific meaning can be gleaned from the camera roll of debauched party scenes his lyrics represent, frequently finds selfhood and freedom in drug-induced euphoria. Travis Scott is something of a young rap agent provocateur. Scott trips through a rager darkly on Birds in the Trap’s “Coordinate,” while Rashad uses Tirade’s “Stuck in the Mud” to parlay a metaphor about car troubles into a rumination about the alcoholism and prescription-drug addiction that nearly ended his career. The two major hip-hop releases of this week - Kanye West understudy Travis Scott’s sophomore studio album Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight and Kendrick Lamar affiliate Isaiah Rashad’s debut album The Sun’s Tirade - illustrate the opposing ends of the spectrum of pill-era hip-hop hedonism. Prescription-drug abuse is modern hip-hop’s not-so-secret shame for every celebration of the numb embrace of Xanax and the like, there’s another story of a life destroyed by the stuff.
