MUMU 8818

by TisaKorean

Where is Tisakorean? On the cover of his newest EP, MUMU 8818, the Texas-born rapper leans on the hood of a blood-red Corvette, limned by the setting sun, looking into the future, the oncoming dusk. He's outside; that's about all we can say. Actually, the more important question is: Where are you? If you're not here, listening to Tisakorean, you might as well be asleep. However, if you ever want to wake up and feel what it's like to be a lecherous bouncy ball, all you have to do is click that SoundCloud link up there and just let loose.

Tisakorean has said in interviews that he just makes the music that he wants to hear. One wishes that all artists felt this way, but that just isn't the case. Often, musicians, while making the kind of music they love, will still keep their audience in mind, taking care to not let their personal whims get in the way of the approachability of their music. Tisa makes no such consideration and only lives to make music that will make him move; the audience doesn't figure much into the process. This has resulted in music that is wildly indulgent, unapologetically weird, and most of all, undeniably fun. It's all encapsulated by the word "silly." Tisakorean is silly, and he doesn't care what you might think about that. Silliness removes self-consciousness and replaces it with clownery. Silliness lets one look at the world in a distorted way, but one that is true in parallel to reality. Tisakorean makes a promise that this will indeed be a silly night, and he's not wrong about that.

From the first seconds of "LET ME HEAR YOU SCREAM," you know exactly what you're getting into: a frenzied and goofy ride through the sex-redolent life of the silliest man alive. The track is boastful but cut humorously by the nursery rhyme cadence that Tisa adopts. The chorus has so many baffling elements—Tisa's drawl encouraging those with "good pussy" to scream out loud, the actual sample of a crowd screaming, the FL-default horns blaring in the back—that it's hard not to laugh from a mixture of pure joy and confusion. Let Me Update My Status from last year saw Tisakorean digging from the recent past as he tried to put his own spin on the Snap style popularized in the early 2000s by artists like Soulja Boy and D4L. He combined the era's ringtone-friendly beats with his ridiculous and near-psychotic rapping style and ended up creating something that sounded like a time capsule from both the past and the future. MUMU 8818 is not as stylistically cohesive, but it does see Tisa push his form of Snap further, like on "Jockin Me," where his flow doubles the weird stop-start melody of the lead sample and runs in a recursive loop, dizzying and mesmerizing the listener. The same sort of technique is used on the highlight "UCCI," which starts to feel like a merry-go-round with its cyclical repetitions.

On two of the tracks, "8818" and "Lightyears," Tisa takes a brief break from his snap-heavy style to attempt some Kanye pastiche, drawing primarily from his Graduation and 808s and Heartbreaks eras. The autotune is used for melodic hooks instead of general insanity, and the instrumentals are more luxurious and sentimental, featuring the Tisa-equivalent of a choir at times. Tisa doesn't do the style better than Kanye has, though that may not be the point. It may be more that Tisa is trying to make the kind of Kanye songs that he knows Kanye is just not interested in making anymore. For some, these tracks could understandably come across as meaningless and disposable, but for those who are also fans of Mr. West, it is possible that you could start to see the love in these tracks, down to the specific way that Tisa is moaning in his autotune cloak. 

Soon enough, though, the steel drum samples come slinking back for "Wrestler," which, along with "Lightyears," close out the EP. Even though we're sure there is a car that is called the "tarantula," when you hear that Tisakorean has "pulled up in a tarantula," at this point in the album, you honestly can't be certain that he means a car and not some sort of monstrous giant spider. And therein lies the true power of being silly: for just a moment—it could be a couple of minutes, it could be a half hour—rationality goes to sleep and lets the rest of the imagination run wild. Who cares that the colors are garish? Why does it matter whether one slurs their words or grunts? These are all worries borne of a desire to please others. Why not try pleasing yourself, for once?

Read the full review on MSMR.substack.com