Ty Dolla $ign hits The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon with Wiz Khalifa — the duo giving Fallon’s stage a double dose of hip hop superstardom. (Kahlifa’s new release is the well-titled for late night Letterman.) Ty Dolla $ign is riding high, playing a dominant part in the hip hop landscape while “crossing over” in such a big time way that even venerable general interest print pages like those of The New Yorker are wrestling with the legacy of just where Ty Dolla $ign fits in and what he means culturally.
The results are plenty of praise for this musical artist, who gets credit for infusing R&B with a rap sensibility that opens up both genres, notably by expanding the range of each and pushing singing into hip hop in a new way. So says Carrie Battan in a review/consideration of Ty’s new Beach House 3 for the magazine. Here are 8 of the most interesting quotes from Battan’s take on Ty, none of which will probably come up on Fallon! It’s not so much that the quotes themselves are strange; it’s just that some may be hard to reconcile with the Ty Dolla $ign fans know. Here’s some of what Battan has to say about the once jarringly explicit Ty Dolla $ign:
- “Ty had widened his purview beyond the realm of dead-eyed debauchery.”
- “He yearns for human connection and monogamy.”
- “[In earlier work] the phrases and the narratives he uses are so filthy that they seem to smugly float”
- “With ‘Beach House 3,’ Ty has arrived at a place of thorough and unexpected spiritual change.”
- “Ty Dolla $ign is far too easygoing—and not nearly famous or cynical enough—to engage in the merely performative exercise of reputation reform.”
- [People credit Kanye West and Drake but ] “along with T-Pain, Ty deserves just as much credit for creating a movement for the hip-hop-minded R. & B. singer.”
- “On ‘Beach House 3,’ he acts as an ambassador from the land of R. & B”
- On ‘Beach House 3’ [Ty Dolla $ign is] “sometimes sounding as though he’s powerless in the face of the urge to sing.”
