Is Hip-Hop Bringing Back the Lost Art of the WTF Album?

When it comes to truth in advertising, few albums this year are going to top Lil Jon’s just-released Total Meditation. Not remotely hip hop, the music is instead a soothing sonic bath akin to what one would hear in a massage-therapy room at a spa. As those tracks wash over you, the rapper, producer and home-improvement guru offers self-help tips (“anxiety can be a big problem for many people. When you meditate on a regular basis,  the health benefits continue to increase”) and specific suggestions on how to meditate: “Maybe you want to sit in a chair or on the floor,” he says, in the same completely straight face he uses throughout the record. “Now, let’s close our eyes so we can help the mind relax. Let’s turn our attention to the problem. Focus on the breath coming in. Sense the cool air.”

Coming from the Atlanta hip-hop wild card who helped take crunk into the mainstream 20 years ago–and just shared the Super Bowl stage with Usher–Total Meditation should be shocking. It’s hard to imagine encountering a more-of-center album coming out for the rest it 2024. Then again, maybe we will. The release of the album, combined with André 3000’s recent New Blue Sun, have announced the revival of the great lost art of the WTF album. And this time, hop hop is happily, headily, leading the charge.

Before we dive in, let’s first distinguish between passion projects like these and albums where an artist was switching course with the goal of actually selling records. In the latter category we have head-scratchers like Lil Wayne’s Rebirth, his misguided attempt at crossing into rock; Dolly Parton’s half-disco Heartbreaker; the robot-pop parts of Neil Young’s Trans; Garth Brooks’ rock-incognito makeover, …. In the Life of Chris Gaines, and the then-Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, which showed us, for better or worse, what would happen if he sang rather than rhymed. Those acts, and the people around them, probably thought such records had the potential to hook them up with a new and different group of fans.

The WTF Album is another beast entirely — a blatantly uncommercial record with almost zero chance of moving product, as the industry likes to say. It’s something the artist does on a whim or as an indulgence or maybe just to mess with people’s heads, or maybe just for the love of the very idea of it. They’re records the acts made for themselves, not for any sort of large-scale buying public, and are usually a few galaxies removed from what we generally expect from them. The most notorious of them remains Lou Reed’s 1975 release Metal Machine Music, two-LPs (bath then) of crackling, often squalid feedback. Coming after some of his most radio-friendly records, like Rock N Roll Animal and Sally Can’t Dance, Metal Machine Music was utterly confounding, then and now. Reed was especially proud of it: I still remember interviewing him years ago and mentioning a German import CD of it, and he just snorted derisively and said the mix was terrible and undeserving of the music.

Other albums that fell or stumbled into that category were Paul McCartney’s three electronic music forays as the Fireman and Stevie Wonder’s 1979 concept double-LP Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (sample songs: “Tree” and “Earth’s Creation”). John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s avant-garde sound collage works, the two Unfinished Music records and Wedding Album, were all unveiled while the Beatles were still a going operation. Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait, his notorious album of largely schmaltzily arranged covers, was also intentionally perverse (but still reached no. 4 on the pop charts).

As Lil Jon pointed out when he spoke to RS last week, his undertaking and André 3000’s are different attempts to stretch out their minds and music. “I was explaining to him my journey,” Lil Jon said, “and he was saying, ‘Yeah, people look at us a certain way, but we showing them that it’s okay to be able to do other things and to care about yourself, your health, and your wellbeing. This image of rappers, blah, blah, blah – we don’t have to be that. We can be other things and show people it’s okay to go do other things.’”

Point taken. Total Meditation is an instructional record, and New Blue Sun is an entirely instrumental one, a new age of New Age. It too would make for acceptable meditation background music. At one of his New York shows on the New Blue Sun tour a few weeks back, André started the 90-minute set by lighting incense at the front of the stage. The live performances based off those album tracks were a bit more muscular and engrossing than on album. But this is music crying out for myrrh and matches: spacey, meandering sounds that wander around in search of a melody, occasionally find one, and then lurch off in another direction. When it all came together, as it did more than enough times, the arrival was worth the journey.

Both albums demonstrate the way a new older hip-hop artists are arriving at new stages of their lives and making art to adapt to it, which includes being unconstrained by genres. But something else more thrilling is also transpiring here. By and large, most major pop, hip hop, rock, and country artists are not encouraged to take big risks. Album releases are all-consuming, multi-platform events, and too much is riding on them to jeopardize a diminished number of streams or any backlash. When someone does challenge expectations with an audacious musical change-up – like Taylor Swift with the Folklore and Evermore excursions or Beyoncé’s forthcoming country album – the artist in question is usually making that move from a position of career dominance. (Not something one can say for Lil Jon.)

In that context, a WTF album feels even more out there than ever before. And that’s a good thing. Whatever one thinks of Total Meditation and New Blue Sun especially, they’re reminders of a time when artists could afford to indulge themselves – and the music industry allowed it, even if begrudgingly. They recall a time when record makers could leap off the assembly line and wander, potentially stumbling into new avenues of expression. They don’t care what you think, and maybe we need more of that. Let’s meditate on that for a moment.