Is Future the Greatest Rapper of All-Time?

Mixtape Pluto is nostalgia, but the craft is exceptional, and an improvement over the albums that functioned as missile launches towards Drake. "Pluto" had me wondering if Future is the greatest ever.

Things weren’t looking optimistic for the army of Future earlier this year when he dropped his two albums, We Don’t Trust You and We Still Don’t Trust You. The mediocre springtime album, and it's better, but still average sequel, saw him as a canvas for Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, and A$AP Rocky’s acts of disrespect against Drake. The Franz Ferdinand Assassination that is “Like That” and to a lesser extent, the Playboi Carti and Travis Scott-assisted “Type Shit”, overshadowed what is a merely average output. Future, 40, was a tad boring, comfortable with being a trap curator, and less concerned with his own self-torpedoing mythology. Granted, the mythology is almost why we tune into an artist who is past forty years old, so we can listen to him add to the monstrous view of himself while using the music to reminisce about the time when his prime was the most defining act in music. Fandom became an obsession. For the group of people that were teenagers or young adults from 2011-2017, Future is the aggregate for melodic hip-hop — the pain, the longing, the swagger that it alludes through 808’s and trap drums. I am not a Future fan because I heard Mixtape Pluto, the mixtape released on Friday to a chuny-sized fanfare; it started for me on Pluto 3D or Monster, an album that is a direct provocation to the warmth and tenderness on 2014’s Honest. (Honest is a good record, regardless; I’m curious to see where this lands in his discography when Future decided to hang up the purple sprite and microphone for good). Despite the strengths of the tape — Future’s voice is as determined as a rock climber, the production is whimsical, taking from Louisiana at times — The Atlanta rapper with the heart and swagger of a Mad Men character is not dropping music that feels seminal; he’s dropping music that adds to grown and ripe legacy.

Mixtape Pluto is charismatically ravaging at times, solid fan service at others. The feeling that you are listening to someone who used to be the biggest rapper alive — perhaps not commercially but he captured the zeitgeist so much that Drake had to come to Atlanta and be a part of his college campus maximalism — isn’t there. It’s been replaced by peerless craft that carries him throughout the record despite the chintz and worldview becoming comfortable. “SOUTH OF FRANCE” is a ketamine or wine drunk dizziness in a club in Greece. “MADE MY HOE FAINT”’s bombast made the writer Meaghan Garvey claim  “welcome back GOAT” on her Twitter page. “MJ” is creepy; Future uses his voice like a stalker would — creeping down your skin until it falls off, seducing you with his venery. “LOST MY DOG” definitely wants to tug at your veins that help pump the blood in your heart, but it’s impossible not to want to hear Future express regret. His voice is like hearing your kid upset at you after a tongue lashing — painful enough to melt you even when you’re feeling startlingly virlie. “I should have known he wasn’t happy”, said Future. Populated on this album are the best beats he has had since The Wizrd, another incredible Future album that doesn’t get enough adoration because his discography is shockingly deep. But, the topic on Twitter hasn’t only been about music; it’s also about the very nature of hearing new Future music in 2024. He’s now a rap legend, an old head that is too cool to be considered one. (Future’s influence on the game is slightly waning a bit, but new stars like Nettspend are definitely sons of his, if not sons of the indelible work ethic).

How much, if anything, can Future give us currently when his legendary run is so ingrained in our society? The answer, in the past half-decade, was to lean into the broadness of the toxicity that he became known for. First, there was an added touch of misogyny on social media, a place where his message used to never land outwardly. Future once relied on furnished but cryptic messages that would have fans whispering about what he could possibly be talking about; a line of a song, or even some football emojis to vaguely threaten Russell Wilson and get his fanbase reacting like museum members at a new exhibit. It was all in juicy gossip, Black male egotistical fun for an artist born to become a template for the uncontrollable passions of man. No artist has ever bent the line between misogyny and inspirational masculinity quite like Future did. If “My Collection” disrespected women — depicting them as red dressed devils that became demonized because they had the nerve to leave Hendrix, then “Throw Away” comes to mind an infamous quote about depression: “it is rage towards inward.” For every song he had where he seemed to take a gauntlet and tossed it at a feminist meeting, there was a song that showed him a tortured soul, one that needed to be put back together through male friendship and a cup of cocaine. It takes an expert amount of mystique and control to tow such lines; women loved him because he had a passion for them; men adored him because underneath his passion lurked a seething unpleasantness. We know that Ciara and Future broke up, but he has never said any of the particulars about that. To see him was to see the unrelenting cool that we were promised when we first listened to hip-hop. Not every rapper is cool, but Future was for as long as it was possible to be. It doesn’t help to simply have one of rap’s greatest voices either. Future’s voice remains slippery as a wet floor in a high school after the janitor goes on his break. It’s louder than a whine; softer than a shout; authoritative without being preachy.

Still, it wasn’t like Future has been lighting the world on fire in the past five years. He’s now fimly a rap legend, perhaps a top five rapper if you’re into that kind of list making, but he’s been in his freebanz sponsored airplane on autopilot while everyone else eats up the past flights to Paris. Besides the excellent “Life Is Good” single with Drake — showing everyone why this beef perpetuated by Future was unfortunate, considering the multitudes of dynamic music Drake and Future have released together — he hasn’t had very memorable singles in the past five years. On top of the lackluster songs, 2022’s  I Never Liked You was his worst album to date. Why was Future marketing himself as this clinical misogynist? It was the anti-thesis to what made him so feared and beloved. The features were solid but his details were missing the gloss and emotional wreckage of his records of his peak; the purpose of his constitution began to be that all men were better than women. The euphoria that takes place on “I Serve the Base” became “Ridin Strikers.” Mixtape Pluto leaves fans with a better plane. As opposed to a giant GQ spread, he’s some pristine nostalgia that reminds you why you loved me in the first place.

I can’t imagine a rap landscape without Future. A question that I wonder: Why isn’t he the greatest rapper of all-time? Let’s think about that before we ask if he is. He’s got the influence, the mixtape influence — something that should be considered important for “greatest” status considering how important mixtapes have become in rap culture. The mixtape, before Apple Music started using the term to sell streams, was a chance for rappers to try out ideas that commercial studios refused to let them try, and getting out an swaggering ethos to make critics swoon. It’s also a regional feature — selling mixtapes out of a trunk was a DJ Screw trademark. Future has the mixtape history, the commercial album history, the flow, the influence, and the contributions to the id and clothing of hip-hop to be considered. Recently, the writer and media mogul Elliott Wilson came out and said that Future is the greatest Atlanta rapper of all-time. I copied the link to the video and sent it my group chat, filled with brothers who have had Future’s music in their ears from when we were chasing each other on concrete outside of school to current times, where we are cities and miles away from one another but still communicating with each other so our minds stay safe and warm in this capitalist planet. One brother said, “absolutely.” I wonder if when it is all set and done, his bust on Mount Rushmore will have smoke running out of its mouth —- sculpted with a custom Ermenegildo Zegna suit.