Mercury
Yulissa Benitez
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Atlanta rapper Mercury has a playful and punk approach to the classics, weaving her way through easy identification at every turn. Her latest mixtape, Tabula Rasa, arrived earlier this year and mixes frantic and spiky production with more standard trap textures. Now she's gearing up to drop new EP fearMercury, out December 7, and she's sampling Queen on new song "Freddie." Anyone who listens to "Bohemian Rhapsody" and thinks, 'I can work with that' is deserving of a listen, on chutzpah alone.
Mercury has much more than audacity going for her, though. "Freddie" doesn't use the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sample as a cheap hook, as sample-based drill and waves of current U.K. rap have done to exhausting effect recently. Producer feardorian doesn't even lean into the Queen original's flashier parts, there's no guitar solo to headbang to. Instead Mercury finds a pocket of space in those mournful pianos and uses them as a base to operate from. The results rub the stadium-sized pathos of the original with Mercury's more grounded observations about being on her grind and running her money up. "Freddie" makes it clear that while the vocalists may share a name, that's about as far as it goes. Mercury walks her own path.
