80 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
The rapper’s new album, “Oofie,” is a past-tense document of disillusionment.
POP MUSIC
Make It Here
Wiki and the endless return of New York hip-hop.
BY CARRIE B AT TA N
PHOTOGRAPH BY DONAVON SMALLWOOD
I
n the summer of 2010, at a block party
in downtown Manhattan, a sixteen-
year-old named Patrick Morales did
something that had become a habit for
him: he charged his way to the front of
the crowd and began to rap. Given his
talent and charisma, the intrusion was
welcome. In the audience was a Harlem
producer named Eric Adiele, who later
said that Morales struck him as “this
kind of rapping ... New York Bart Simp-
son.” At the party, once the background
music stopped, Morales—who is half
Puerto Rican and half Irish, and goes
by Wiki—continued to rap. Adiele ap-
proached Wiki about collaborating. (“I
make beats, you’re not corny,” Adiele,
who goes by Sporting Life, told him.)
Eventually, the pair, along with another
rapper, named Hak (Hakeem Lewis),
formed a group called Ratking.
Like most young artists full of in-
tensity and ideas, the members of Rat-
king set out to do something novel—
or, at least, to resist the temptations of
nineties New York hip-hop. But they
wound up honoring the city’s hip-hop
heritage better than most. On Ratking’s
début album, “So It Goes,” from 2014,
the trio painted New York as a creative
playground, rather than as a city that
had all but closed its doors to young
and financially disadvantaged artists.
New York authenticity was treated as a
birthright, not as an object of aspiration
or nostalgia. Ratking avoided the nar-
rative of a New York flattened by money
and technology. “Think the city has let
up? Get up, wake up/Open your eyes,”
Wiki implored on a song called “Canal.”
Inspired by the nineteen-seventies
electronic-art-punk act Suicide and the
raucous dynamism of the Wu-Tang
Clan, Ratking made the kind of noisy
and confident hip-hop that the Beastie
Boys, Dipset, and the A$AP Mob had
before it. But the music didn’t sound as
if it had been directly copied from these
groups; instead, Ratking had cut its own
path through a similar array of New
York-specific experiences and touch-
stones—turnstile-jumping, uptown
house parties, noodle houses and bagel
shops, punk and rap music, intergener-
ational fraternization at skate parks,
malt liquor and weed. “This ain’t nine-
ties revival/It’s earlier/It’s tribal re-
vival,” Wiki rapped on “Protein,” a fran-
tic, skittering track from “So It Goes.”
Ratking soon disbanded, but Wiki,
the group’s magnetic figurehead, was
primed for a solo career. On his full-
length début, “No Mountains in Man-
hattan,” from 2017, he sounded like the
protagonist of a Harmony Korine fever
dream, a tiny, petulant charmer fast-
talking his way through bodega lines and
subway stations. In Wiki’s cartoon-strip
rendering of Manhattan, he could win
over beautiful girls despite his small stat-
ure and missing teeth, and he could make
it onstage in the nick of time, no matter
how much he’d drunk. The album’s pro-
duction created a collage of satisfying
textures—soul samples, deep bass, gritty
lo-fi noise arrangements, and careful or-
chestral flourishes—for Wiki to play
with. In Ratking’s early days, his rhetor-
ical virtuosity and forceful delivery earned
him comparisons to Eminem, but on
“No Mountains” that dense, brute-force
style gave way to more complex and sup-
ple verses. Verbal gymnastics came easy
to him, and he knew it. “You was the
worst rapper/I was the best rapper!” he
shouted on a track called “Mayor,” glee-
fully stressing “You” and “I.”
“Mayor,” which sampled a soul song
by the Arrows, was like a campaign
anthem, positioning Wiki as a quasi-
political leader in his own neighborhood.
