Watsky and Grieves
If you just read the lyrics of songs by George Watsky with no aural context, you might think he was a country-western artist, only one who must sing really fast or write terribly long songs, so large are the text blocks. There’s a lot of honky-tonk swagger and bitter laments about the women who done him wrong, drinking that he either looks forward to or regrets, and places he’ll always miss, plans to go to, or never wants to see again. The rapper clearly fancies himself a bit of a poet, an aspiration only encouraged by landing his rambling essay collection, How to Ruin Everything, on the New York Times Bestseller chart.
He just dropped his fifth full-length, the accurately titled Complaint (it’s full of ‘em, there’s little he can’t find to gripe about), with a support tour due to hit House of Blues on March 17. Now going by just his last name, Watsky came up through the San Francisco poetry scene, winning the 2006 Brave New Voices National Poetry Slam. His musical ventures have taken a little while to catch on, but he seemed to come into his own in 2016 with X Infinity, which debuted at number four on Billboard’s Rap Albums Chart. Representative of his chatty, snarky humor are videos currently streaming online for “Welcome to the Family” and “Mean Ass Drunk.”