Everyone Wants to Be Lil Pump
The joke in the title is that he actually dropped out—of high school, the story goes, though the album’s spelling of "Harverd" suggests the punchline matters more than the facts. Harverd Dropout is Lil Pump’s second album, arriving on the back of a run that moved faster than almost anyone expected: Gucci Gang going four-times platinum before half the internet had processed what it was, then the Kanye West collaboration I Love It which was either peak absurdism or a new kind of genius depending on your threshold for commitment to a bit, then Butterfly Doors and Racks on Racks, the latter set in a Mad Max wasteland with Pump and a squad of warrior women defending territory with flamethrowers—a better concept than half the actual blockbusters that came out that year.
The lead single is Be Like Me, featuring Lil Wayne—the right call, given that Wayne is one of the few rappers from whose vantage point you can actually see Pump’s trajectory clearly. The video, directed by Sophie Muller (Beyoncé, Björk, Coldplay—an intimidating résumé to bring to this particular project), features retirees, animals, and a nine-year-old celebrity impersonator named Riley Dashwood all doing their best Lil Pump impression. The thesis is that everyone wants to be him. The video makes the case with enough visual absurdism that you can’t quite dismiss it.
He said around the time of the album’s release: I want to be the biggest thing out there, simply because I’m different from everyone else. The route I’m taking is gonna be crazy. And it’s just the beginning—I haven’t even blown up yet.
The confidence is either completely unfounded or completely accurate; the difficulty with Lil Pump is that you can never quite tell, which is probably a deliberate feature. Billboard put him on their 21 Under 21 list. He appeared on Fallon, Ellen, Corden. At eighteen years old, from Florida, with neon dreadlocks and face tattoos and the kind of oversized charisma that reads as either genius or catastrophe depending on where you’re standing.
Whether Harverd Dropout can sustain momentum over a full album’s runtime—whether there’s enough variation in the formula to hold together as a cohesive record rather than a playlist of increasingly loud moments—is what I’m actually curious about. The appetite for what he does is clearly there. What I want to know is whether he can do more than one thing.