Who’s Papi, Who’s Lolita

The Urban Noize crew out of Miami put Jay Z and Lana Del Rey in the same remix and titled it Papi & Lolita, leaving the casting decision entirely to the listener. The conventional read is conventional. But the non-conventional one is considerably funnier, and I’ll leave that hanging where it is.

Del Rey’s voice has a quality that works surprisingly well against hip-hop production—that slow, heavily lipsticked melancholy sits in a different register than a rap verse and creates genuine tension rather than just contrast. Jay Z brings what Jay Z always brings: the comfortable authority of someone who stopped proving himself a decade ago and has been coasting on accumulated gravity ever since. The production underneath them both sounds like it was always supposed to go this way.

It shouldn’t cohere as well as it does. It does.