On F.U.N. T.O.Y., the voices surrounding Sideshow—parents, peers, pastors, sidewalk philosophers—appear between the songs like a Greek Chorus of damnation. They offer no hope or encouragement. Instead, they detail the myriad ways Sideshow and his generation are doomed. One such voice opens the record by explaining that “the young people are not gonna make it into heaven,” another issues hyper-specific death threats, and another shruggingly concedes that violence is “in his blood.” Sideshow doesn’t push back on these ideas much. His dead-eyed hustler tales indicate someone who is resigned to his fate.
Sideshow has a utilitarian, disarmingly personal writing style, an approach that feels less concerned with theatrics or manipulation of language than blunt force. His verses are collections of starkly composed snapshots, brief scenes of terror or heartache rendered in vocals that suggest Boldy James and Oddisee drained of all color; even when his delivery becomes frenetic, like the paranoid flow he deploys on “Bad Friend,” his voice still moves with a slippery codeine crawl. It gives his songs a hypnotic quality, making it easy to miss brutal passages like “All my life I been stepped on/God put both feet on me/I cried, my cries they get ignored” on initial listens. There’s a thick air of inevitability in Sideshow’s work, the kind of malaise that comes from always—unfortunately—being proven right about the world.
In previous albums, Sideshow’s relationship with selling and consuming drugs occupied the margins like a distant stormcloud, affecting the atmosphere without being at the center of it. Here, substances play a more central role as ubiquitous numbing agents needed to get through the day. Lean is his narcotic of choice. “I’m just tryna put a thousand dollars in one styrofoam,” he raps on “How to Kill a Man”,” following up on that thought later in the song: “Only codeine gives me purpose.”
In contrast to Sideshow’s deadpan vocals, the beats he chooses are active and skittish, tumbling over themselves like loose truck tires racing down a hill. Popstar Benny’s contributions are full of colorful, pixelated synths zigzagging around plugg drums, while chameleonic Chicago producer Ayochillmannn provides shuffling, futuristic Southern funk. When combined with Sideshow’s droopy intonations, it all has a crackling, circuits-frying energy. It’s tactile; you can almost smell the frayed wiring.
“Villain in Your Story (Still UA)” is a particularly harsh toke of a closer. Marc Rivera’s trudging beat is the perfect backdrop for Sideshow’s unblinking honesty (“You ain’t know I’m a fucked up dude?” he raps, less of a question than a sneer). But after 30 minutes of unrelenting darkness, Sideshow changes perspective. During a spoken-word outro, he explains that as a Black person in America, he can’t be depressed. He’s oppressed; there are systems in place designed to keep him trapped under problems engineered to be insurmountable. The bleary drug abuse, the ambient threat of violence, and the voices preaching downfall are part of a purposeful cycle. If everyone and everything around you only speaks prophecies of doom, you might eventually become a doomsayer yourself.
