Why I’ve Been Listening To So Much NAV Music Lately
Just hear me out, he has rackity rack-rack-racks IN his knapity sack-sack-sack.
Hip-hop fans have it out for The Weeknd’s XO co-sign, Navraj Goraya, better known to most people as NAV and better known to me and my friends as Navraj Goraya. “He’s boring, he has the same flows, he’s so monotonous, his voice is annoying, he’s not innovating” they whine as they listen to the 27-song deluxe version of Lil Baby’s My Turn, guilty of all of the same crimes they allege NAV of 27 times over.
I’ve been listening to a lot of NAV lately and I wasn’t sure why at first. I actually kind of liked his self-titled debut mixtape back in 2017 and often found the lead single ‘Myself’ stuck in my head that year, and its accompanying music video’s visuals were to die for. It admittedly wasn’t the most innovative record I had ever heard, of course, but it was still a moody post-Weeknd kind of track that I was a sucker for in the Starboy era. A few months later, NAV released the Metro Boomin-produced Perfect Timing mixtape which both propelled him to new heights in terms of success and also in criticism.
“Hip-hop heads” as it were did not like this mixtape, and this hate was only accelerated by Anthony Fantano’s review of his debut album RECKLESS which released a little under a year later. When Fantano dislikes an album so much, he simply refuses to give it a score on the 1–10 scale and simply titles it “NOT GOOD” (he’s since also opened up his scoring system to include 0/10), and these types of reviews always open the floodgates for hate and memes. NAV quickly became a joke to most people who heard the name, but he still manages to pull in impressive numbers with every album he releases, which leads me to believe something doesn’t quite add up. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make here.
I’m one of the people who certainly appreciates a good NAV joke from time to time, but I also am honest enough with myself to say “Hey, actually, there are some pretty great songs on Perfect Timing.” So veering away from the hate and the memes and getting into the positives, I actually find myself really enjoying NAV music in a way that reminds me of the way I enjoyed Future’s music when he blew up all those years ago. There’s something satisfying about listening to a Future project for the first time and finding the best songs on each to put into a playlist for future (it’s a pun if you want it) listening. The same can be applied to NAV. Much like Future, NAV’s projects are all flawed and feature a handful of dud tracks, but behind them, there are some real actual gems to be dug out.
It’s also fun to be part of a fandom that’s also so self-aware. When someone comes up to a NAV fan and says “NAV sucks, bro” they’re immediately met with either a stone-cold “we know” or even better, a “NAV is the GOAT” attached to a meme of him with like a Mozart wig or with a goat silhouette as his shadow or something similarly goofy. On the other hand, if you say “Lil Baby sucks, bro” to a Lil Baby fan, you’re going to get bombarded with self-serious defenses from an army of high schoolers. NAV memes are top tier.
NAV’s lyrics ticks all the same boxes as most other popular rappers around right now: boasts about money, hard drugs, cars, women, jewelry, sex, fame, and his reaction to “the haters”. NAV knows he has haters, and since Perfect Timing, he’s directly addressed them in his poetry on songs like ‘Did You See NAV?’ and my personal favorite NAV song, ‘Brown Boy’ (the 2020 one — he has another song from when he was still independent also called ‘Brown Boy’). NAV is self-aware and he knows people don’t like him, but despite playing it off, it’s not hard to tell that it does bother him. This is where NAV becomes a truly fascinating lyricist to me.
While NAV’s contemporaries check those same braggadocios lyrical boxes, they often exude effortless levels of confidence and self-seriousness, there’s a level of believability to most rappers’ claims. When NAV brags in his songs, they come off as hollow and almost insincere, even when he’s telling the truth; I don’t doubt that NAV does have sex, I don’t doubt that he does have VVS diamonds on his watch or whatever. But I think that is the point, however. NAV is insecure and he’s trying to impress, especially the people who doubted him — not the haters who make fun of his music, but the people he grew up around, the people from his block who said he’d never make it and he’d never have jewelry or women around him. His lyrics have a near lack of confidence to them, he’s bragging about materialism to prove something to his old doubters but also to himself. NAV’s lyrics deliver an almost melancholia, he doesn’t mean what he’s saying even if it’s true, he simply wants his opposition to hear what he’s saying.
In a lot of ways, NAV almost feels like the Lil B of his generation; to the average onlooker, he’s a meme. Even to his real fans, it likely started with them listening to him as a joke. Many potential skeptics went into Lil B’s 2011 opus I’m Gay expecting it to be a joke but were immediately struck down by the emotional weight of songs like “Open Thunder Eternal Slumber” or “I Hate Myself” and the absurdity of sampling Joe Hisaishi’s “One Summer’s Day” from the greatest film of all time or an ultra-rare Yukiko Okada cut (may she rest in peace). Similarly, I’m sure a lot of people like myself also went into NAV’s self-titled major debut mixtape not expecting downright crushing lyrics off the bat like “When I’m sober I just don’t like who I am, pour me up a 4 and I feel like myself again” on his breakout track “Myself” which opens up the record.
“Myself” feels like the kind of song that could have opened any now-legendary mid-2010s rap career. As NAV’s debut single, its woozy production and emotional vocal delivery drew attention quickly, and nobody at the time would have been able to deny that. The problem though is that as the opening track to NAV’s debut mixtape, it sets our expectations too high. I know a lot of people who listened to the NAV mixtape didn’t even make it the whole way through. “Myself” is a song that many people could relate to — it’s not an uncommon thing for people to escape the pains of life through inebriation, just walk down to your local dive bar and tell me I’m wrong about that. But while “Myself” finds itself a bit relatable, the track that follows it on his debut mixtape is anything but; the song titled “NAV” is specifically NAV boasting about himself — it’s not relatable. “I remember being broke and down bad, now I pay nothing for me sneakers ‘cause I’m NAV” he sings. I for one am not NAV, and I can’t relate to this. I’m sure this turned a lot of people off right after the strong starter that “Myself” was, especially with how bad and annoying the hook is.
The song that NAV named after himself on the mixtape he named after himself is anything but exemplary of who NAV is as an artist on its surface, but it’s this idea that not all of NAV’s music is relatable that makes him so unique. So often we try to look for ourselves in other artists, that’s just how we as emotionally capable human beings function. NAV tries something entirely different on a lot of his songs by writing music one can’t relate to. And while he doesn’t always nail it the way The Weeknd does on his song Kiss Land where he details his personal experience of leaving his small neighborhood in Toronto to wreak havoc across the globe for the first time in his life, capping it off with a repeated refrain of “this ain’t nothing to relate to”. Instead, NAV’s lyrics once again display an almost inauthentic masquerade for his insecurities.
Further down the line on Bad Habits, songs like “Why You Crying Mama” further exemplify the depth of NAV’s music, a song that explores the moment NAV’s mother found out he was selling drugs to get by after she found thousands of dollars hidden in his closet.
The thing that people don’t seem to get is that NAV’s music is a lot deeper than his “monotone voice” gives off. If anything, the roboticism of his voice conveys the power of his emotions, a trait that’s often praised in (biased plug incoming) critically acclaimed artists like Japanese technopop powerhouse Perfume’s often melancholy and heartbroken lyrics. There is of course a clear difference between the world’s greatest band and a B-list rapper like NAV, but there are still notable similarities like that too. NAV is hurt and he uses his achievements as a way to cope with the pain. A small dive into the best of NAV’s discography will easily show this.
And that’s what I find most fascinating about NAV’s music. It’s impressive because it offers an entirely different perspective than most of his other contemporaries, though it doesn’t make itself so apparent on the surface, which is likely one of the biggest turn-offs many people have with him whether they even realize it or not. On top of all of that though, NAV also produces a lot of his own music, having a hand from anywhere between a full half to the entirety of the production credits on any of his given projects. His beats aren’t the most innovative in the world of course, and if you’ve ever heard an old Weeknd project, you’ve heard better before, but there’s something captivating about NAV’s own production and his choices in collaborator’s production. He knows how to curate his own sound, even if this hollow imitation of The Weeknd isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
But just why is my Last.fm account filled with so many NAV scrobbles lately? Why have I been listening to so much NAV? Well, to put it plainly, I’m dissatisfied with a lot of the current trends in popular hip-hop music. As you could probably gather from the beginning of this article, I don’t like Lil Baby at all. I’ve always loved popular music, and I still do when popular music is fun and worth listening — I think Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album SOUR is one of my favorite albums this year.
However, popular hip-hop has been quite boring to me, and I can trace it back to two specific releases starting the trend: Migos’ Culture II and Drake’s Scorpion. Clocking in at 24 and 25 songs respectively, I think these two particular albums from 2018 made record labels realize that there is a huge market for over-bloated albums. Release nights are huge for the record industry, and a majority of make-or-break streams are…well, maked or breaked there. They know that when a major artist releases an album, millions of people will stay up till midnight to listen to every song on it. So they take advantage of that fact by putting as many songs as possible on there. And with so many low-effort rappers dominating the charts right now, it’s not problem for them to pump out 25–30 songs the week before a release date and call it an album. It’s in the work ethic of rappers; Juice WRLD (may he rest in peace) allegedly left this world with over 2000 songs left unreleased (yes, you read that right: two thousand songs). Interscope Records will be milking his grave dry for years and years to come.
So when Drake released Scorpion, the record label had two important points: the first was that they were going to get 25 full streams from almost every person who listened to the album on release night and the second and arguably most important is that because there’s so many songs, people are going to find their favorites and create the next smash-hit. In the case of Scorpion, that came in the form of ‘In My Feelings’, a song that on release night, I did not even remember hearing which speaks to the impact of putting 25 samey songs on an album. But nevertheless, ‘In My Feelings’ became the song of the summer of 2018, prompting the “Kiki Challenge” on social media and playing on every radio you heard. I’ve listened to Scorpion in full maybe twice since then.
At the beginning of 2020 when the pandemic hit and live events ceased completely, the major record labels panicked because they knew they weren’t going to be making touring revenue and they knew they weren’t getting good enough cuts to line their greedy pockets from the equally-greedy streaming services. Then someone had a devious idea: reformatting the concept of the “deluxe album”. Previously, a “deluxe album” was usually limited to 2 or 3 bonus tracks for buying the album at a Target or Forever 21 or whatever. However, after the success of Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake getting a ‘deluxe’ add-on in the form of Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World 2, the much-anticipated sequel to his magnum opus, the record label had a putrid “a-ha!” moment — reappropriating the concept of the deluxe album to the digital age. They know their artists are recording hundreds of songs a month anyway, all they have to do is let them release some about 10–15 extras and call it a “deluxe version”, change the color of the album artwork, and they now have double the revenue for next to no effort, on top of ruining the sanctity and artform of what the medium of the album is supposed to be.
So why am I talking about this in the middle of this article about NAV? Well, the most popular “freshman rappers” in the world right now — rappers like Lil Baby, DaBaby, Lil Durk, and Polo G— are pretty samey and mostly unimpressive to begin with (although I can’t lie, Lil Baby’s ‘The Bigger Picture’ is fucking powerful, but even that song feels like a miracle, being tacked on likely by popular demand as the final track of the “deluxe version” of his album My Turn). All of them have recently released albums that already have far too many songs to begin with, and on top of that, the “deluxe editions” add more mediocre songs to the fray. I’m left brain-meltingly bored and unimpressed compared to something like Travis Scott’s absolutely phenomenal psych-trap opus ASTROWORLD, arguably the biggest album of 2018. And if ASTROWORLD released even a two years later, we’d likely have an ASTROWORLD “deluxe edition” by now. I have no doubts his next album, UTOPIA, will receive a deluxe edition, which is wildly upsetting to think about as Travis Scott has time and again proven himself to be one of hip-hop’s most intentional and talented artists, and I have a hard time stomaching the fact that he would compromise the intent of his album by throwing B-sides on as a “deluxe version”.
So to put it plainly, why have I been listening to so much NAV? Because I would rather listen to who the people claim to be “hip-hop’s most boring artist” instead of being bored by the absolute mediocrity of DaBaby that the people are championing right now. I would rather listen to NAV’s discography just to have something new to listen to.
Listen to Good Intentions, my personal favorite NAV album here:
