The no-holds-bar rapper and producer weave a tight tapestry of musical references that only hundreds of hours spent sweating to music by queer elders could produce.
Muvaland Vol. 2, the second collaborative EP from Brooklyn rapper Cakes da Killa and house producer Proper Villains, starts with a bang: “This is for f**gots,” Cakes drawls before nary a rhyme has been spit. He repeats the statement again and again, in case you misheard it the first time. Then, about 30 seconds in, a pulsating beat drops, and Cakes unleashes his signature military-grade precision flow, which resides comfortably between Lil’ Kim’s confident snarl and Busta Rhymes’ full-chested bravado. The track in question, “Stoggaf,” sets the tone for what Vol. 2 is all about—unabashed club music, unrelenting lyricism, and attitude.
By his own admission, Cakes da Killa came up in the so-called queer hip-hop boom of the early 2010s, counting the likes of Zebra Katz, Mykki Blanco, and L1ef among his peers. In retrospect, the fervor around this purported scene seems misplaced—they were all very different artists with different destinies. At the same time, queer culture has shifted dramatically from a decade ago: Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race wouldn’t be snatching Emmys for years to come, giant corporations never mentioned Pride, and Gen-Z superstar Lil Nas X was still in grade school. While the recent mainstreaming has its pros and cons, Cakes now has the space to create something with his community in mind, decidedly shunning the hetero gaze.
Muvaland Vol. 2 isn’t just a house record with entertaining verses thrown on top—Cakes and Proper Villains deftly weave a tight tapestry of musical references that only hundreds of hours spent sweating to music by queer elders could produce. The intro to “What’s the Word” is reminiscent of a bitch track (a kind of shady diss record made popular in the ’90s ballroom scene), with Cakes exasperatedly coaxing a nameless friend into a night out (“Yeah, girl, what? Yo! Yeah, girl, just yeah. Girl? Girl!”). In Proper Villains, Cakes has found the type of collaborative partner who comes around once in a career. Villains’ nuanced dance production is the perfect romper room for Cakes to go crazy in, his incessant wordplay bouncing off the structure of booming bass and diamond-sharp hi-hats. “Lite Werk” is where their partnership shines the brightest. The beat is almost unsettling, shifting from muffled pounding to rimshots until the last minute when the music shifts tempo and drops into a clattering polyrhythm. It’s these moments that turn Vol. 2 into a statement and not merely a handful of fun club tracks. It’s about who’s at the club, why, where they’re from, and what they have to say.
The closing track, “Spinning,” changes the mood completely. A love song, it features vocals from Australian pop singer Sam Sparro, and for the first time in the EP’s 15 minutes, Cakes lets his guard down. Singing softly, “I’m sinking in sand, and I can’t feel my feet/I’m lost in your dance,” he sounds like he’s about to slo-mo death-drop into a lover’s arms. The song unlocks yet another facet of Muvaland Vol. 2: that when it’s all said and done, the comedown can be just as sweet as the build-up. These pair of Muvaland EPs started as quarantine projects, but within the canon of rap music, queer or otherwise, they will be remembered as the shift in Cakes da Killa’s career when it all came together—when both his persona and his talent went supernova.
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