MEGAN

It's hard to overstate Megan Thee Stallion's success: She's not just a rap star, but the kind of supercharged celebrity who appears in commercials and movies and deals with pop stars while serving as the new standard-bearer of his rap legacy. Houston. On MEGAN, her latest album, you can feel the pressure on her to keep all those plates spinning—to keep the momentum going, not to screw it up. After Tina Snow, the 2018 EP that established Megan as a rapper who's as badass, funny, and charismatic as anyone, her entire body of work has, to varying degrees, felt like exercises in being everything to everyone. But it's never been as distracting as it is MEGANan uneven album so busy giving each type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.

Do you share Megan's enthusiasm for anime? Next, you'll be blown away by “Otaku Hot Girl,” which is a sample song Jujutsu Kaisen and includes an introduction by one of the show's voice actors. The soundtrack's “Bankroll Got It” is uninteresting – though it's not like he's working with an anime famous for its music – and the character references are serious but excruciatingly bad. The best song that draws on her love of Japanese culture is the multilingual “Mamushi,” which pulls the theme without flattening her personality. Maybe instead you need the new Megan to play in your Pilates class: She's got you covered with the feel-good “Worthy,” a Lizzo-encoded pop song. Those muscles are put to more effective use on “Spin,” where Victoria Monét's silky hook complements Megan's aggressively lovelorn lyrics. Fluffy finger tapping sounds like it was on Love Hate. (Come to think of it, Megan would have dropped “Shawty Is Da Shit.”)

Then there are the songs for those deeply invested in Meghan's beefs and fights. I can imagine fans gathering in group chats, analyzing subliminals and clues as if they were in an Agatha Christie book club. After the last three months, I've been beaten, so I care less about this game. Still, she makes some good jokes on “Hiss,” where she calls out the misogynistic dudes in rap who can't keep her name out of their mouths. (Drake had a one-sided vendetta towards her for a while now; Megan responds with some BBL Drizzy theories of her own.) “Rattle,” which has a fast, groovy beat South Florida melodic rappers would eat up, packs a punch. “Cause niggas don't look like niggas/They're scared of each other, but they hit on women,” he raps. he could be talking about a dozen different rappers, which makes the song seem like a pointed indictment of hip-hop culture in general. As critical as that line is, he's still having fun yelling, “I ain't got no tea on me, that's what I think TMZ” while banging out a Harley Quinn hack in the background.