When the Hellfyre collective remixed Future’s “Honest”, it felt as though no commercial rapper was safe from the reign of art rap’s ingenious methods. Soul brothers milo and Riley Lake are storming the pop castle though on their remix of Lorde’s “Tennis Court”, which they’ve re-titled “the lorde’s prayer in a low fidelity”.
Riley’s reconstruction is curated with milo in mind, softly existing beneath his spoken style that distorts Lorde’s lyrics to reference Infinite Jest and Digable Planets with a clever “we be to rap, what Keynes be to Locke”. While the opening verse is too dense with obscure references to dissect entirely, milo’s “if the jester were infinite / and this were a tennis court / I would have participated / I woulda been a better sport” gives us a little more to connect with than Lorde’s one-percenter problems. Later in milo’s remix, he says “at a point in life where I refer to microwaving as cooking”, offering an everyman’s moment that cuts through his own predilection for Foster Wallace and World of Warcraft references that travel in one ear and out the other. This is why you’ll see the kids stuck in their awkward stage next to sensitive bros at a milo show. This is why Millennials, as generation nice, might make a better tomorrow. It’s a slight example with an impact yet to be proven. If anything, milo remains connected to universal anxieties spawned by technology severing our relationship to the natural world, our great battle of disconnect, compartmentalizing our fears into “at a point in life where I prefer AC to zephyr breeze.”
milo’s A Toothpaste Suburb is out September 22 on Hellfyre Club. For more from Riley Lake listen to his curated mix for our Friday Night series.
