Dici doesn’t want to be your poppy boy toy. He’s not chasing Eminem or Drake, and better yet, I never get the impression that he’s interested in crossing over into anything overtly melodic over menacing in nature. My boy Dici has been getting harder in his last couple of releases, and his new single “Flip” just might qualify as his most potent release thus far. Instead of crisply adorning a minimalist beat with a breathy attack as he did in “Five Rings,” “Flip” sees this player turning up the bass and his own attitude for what feels like a sizzling, uncompromising threat to the top tier players in hip-hop today.
This rhythm is pretty punchy, but let’s face it – I don’t know that Dici doesn’t prefer working off of something a little edgier than the status quo calls for. He doesn’t necessarily assault the drums with as rough and tumble a verse as he can muster for every beat of the song, but at the same time he isn’t holding back in his delivery at all (on the contrary, I believe he’s pushing himself to go as heavy as he can without losing some sense of control over the groove).
Watch the video for “Flip” below
The bassline is as buffed out as a South Beach weightlifter, and Dici is handling it better than I ever would have thought he could. Indeed, he hasn’t shied away from trying bigger and better things every time he gets into the studio, but the way this single is being presented to us just feels a little more evolved than anything he’s stuck his name on before now. He’s probably ready to battle some like-minded players in the Miami scene, if not take his game up to the mainstream artists frequently faulted for leaving hip-hop in arrested development over the past three years.
Dici’s lyrics are getting a little more suggestive and multi-interpretive as time goes by, and I like that “Flip” isn’t so surreal in its narrative as to sound like a purely introspective listen, much as a couple of my favorite songs by this rapper have previously. I love that he’s seeming to come undone with the increased studio time, and it’s building something within him that could become one of the most honest and expressive outlets to emerge from the shadows of the southeastern hip-hop underground in a long time now.
Experimentalism will provide the keys to the kingdom of rap and pop music the same in the next few years, and Dici is already putting himself up there with some of the most promising names in both genres as an artist who needs to be considered a shoo-in for mainstream acceptance and promotion. We’re seeing the most demanding generation of music fans take over the market at this moment in history, but luckily enough for Dici, he has almost everything it takes to keep his fan base happy and hungry for even more in this performance of “Flip.” Time will tell, but I think he’s likely here to stay.
