With Future, past is prologue and the results stay the same… another No. 1

(September 30, 2024).  There’s a saying that goes: “The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  It’s commonly (but likely inaccurately) attributed to Albert Einstein.

But there’s apparently nothing “stupid” about what veteran rapper Future is doing.  Especially if it means getting to the top of the Billboard charts yet again without changing a thing about his style, his music or his messages.

With Future, past is clearly prologue.  What you heard from him on 2015’s first No. 1 DS2 is just about what you’ll get on his latest, Mixtape Pluto.  With eleven No. 1 albums in just over nine years (plus a few near-misses in that span), the trap-rapper has never wavered from his well-worn themes of pushing and popping pills, gang-banging, beating cases, calling shots, and treating females like doormats.  It’s been a decade filled with women he deems mostly unworthy, plus the same predictable cocktail of pills, lean, and iced-out jewelry… all underscored by random, moody melodies that serve as little more than background music to his tales of self-demonization.

Oh, and trap beats.  Those rehashed, recycled, regurgitated trap beats. You’d think that his head-knocking fans would be ready to turn the page just to keep their heads on a swivel.  But Future proves that the well-oiled machine he’s been running for years still has plenty of gas left — or at least enough for another trip to the top of the charts.

This week Mixtape Pluto gives him his eleventh No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 — and his third in 2024 — moving him ahead of Elvis Presley and into a tie for fifth place with Eminem, Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen and Ye (formerly Kanye West) among artists with the most chart toppers on the marquee chart.

Just six months ago, the Atlanta legend was in thirteenth place on that elite list.  Now he’s tied for fifth with four of the biggest names in music history!  Only the Beatles (19), Jay-Z and Taylor Swift (14 each), and Drake (13) have more.

And at the rate Future, a/k/a “Pluto,” is going, he could easily tie and surpass some of the others — particularly Jay-Z who hasn’t had a No. 1 album in seven years, and Drake who is persona non grata at the moment — to move further up the list.  It’s not that far fetched to predict that the “Like That” trapper could be sitting in third place overall by the end of, say, 2026.  

And this year’s trifecta places Pluto in a category that only a handful of other artists have achieved in a single calendar year: the Beatles (three different years), Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, the Glee Cast, Taylor Swift, and the Monkees. The Monkees went one further and had four No. 1 albums in 1967.

So how is it that Future, who is nicknamed after the Dwarf Planet and who is seemingly the least likely of all these legends, continues to fly under the radar with album after No. 1 album and is now in elite territory with Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, EGOTs, and artists widely considered the greatest of all time in their respective genres?

The answer may be simple: don’t change a damn thing, and be unapologetic about it.

Not even the meds he raps about have changed colors.  In 2015, he paid homage to Percocet, lean (promethazine and codeine) and cocaine.  Today, the drugs of choice are amphetamines, Percocet, lean, and methazine (oh, yeah and cocaine still).  Their nicknames may have changed (in 2024 he refers to them as “perkies,” “Texas,” “kis” and “Addy”), but the high remains the same.

Ten years ago at age 30, he lamented relationships with women he deemed unworthy.  Now 40, those same women still deserve his disdain (“told my bitch if I gotta be faithful I might fall off” on the new album’s fourteenth track, “Told My”). Women worthy of his love are rewarded with three D’s: diamonds, dick, and disloyalty.

Oh and drugs… make that 4 D’s.

Even music critics, in their reviews of his previous albums, have heaped praise on Future while at the same time acknowledging that he rarely, if ever, deviates from his dark, drug-hazed narrative.

In a 2015 review of DS2, Sheldon Pearce of HipHopDX wrote: “Dirty Sprite 2 doesn’t survey any new territory for the croaking crooner, but it magnifies the depth of his distress and channels it into an even richer multilayered sonic experience.”

In a mixed review of 2016’s Evol, Craig Jenkins of Billboard concluded: “Evol doesn’t break any rules or set many new ones but, as the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of wonders Future and his team wield in their creation of druggy, downcast afterparty dispatches, it is a joy.”

Riley Wallace of Exclaim! wrote of 2017’s self-titled LP: “With exciting production that features his usual cast of ATL tastemakers who are (in some cases) paired with surprising co-producers like Jake One and !llmind, Future has crafted an opus full of bangers. So, while he doesn’t break much new creative ground, there’s a lot to love about Future.”

And those are just the first three solo No. 1 albums…

In a lukewarm review of the comparatively optimistic 2020 No. 1 LP High Off Life, NME‘s Luke Morgan Britton wrote: “[the] trap outlier exerts flashes of greatness… but doesn’t quite fulfill his sales pitch.” He added: “Future described his last album, 2019’s The Wizrd, as the closing of a chapter, meaning that High Off Life seemed primed to signal a fresh start.  Despite its glimpses of greatness, though, this album revisits too many of the rapper’s trademark themes to truly make good on his jubilant pre-release promises.”

High Off Life then begged the question: could Future move on from those dark themes even if he tried?

Somewhat remarkably, given this well-documented decade-plus-long experiment in, umm, persistency, the “F*ck Up Some Commas” artist has a dedicated fan base who will ride with him until the wheels fall off.  They’ve shown that, release after release, hip-hop’s Dark Knight will earn at least six digits (separated by a single comma) in album equivalent units during the first week of any new album’s arrival. 

At the same time, Pluto has also apparently reached a ceiling.  This past week, he sold 129,000 units, a respectable but hardly blockbuster figure.  Never has an album billed solely to him without an accompanying artist topped the quarter-million mark in first week consumption.  Only two collaborations have topped that milestone: the 2015 Drake team-up What a Time To Be Alive (375,000 units) and this year’s billing with producer Metro Boomin, We Don’t Trust You (251,000).

Yet, thanks to some impeccable timing (his releases almost always come during low competition weeks) and that loyal fan base, Future’s albums still manage just enough to reach the top.  (He beats pop upstart Chappell Roan’s No. 2 LP by 24,000 units for this week’s crown, and that was with Roan’s album getting a huge boost by way of multiple new vinyl variants in commemoration of its first anniversary.)

Pluto’s consistency seems even more remarkable when compared to the performance of one of his longtime pop contemporaries who also debuts in this week’s top ten.  Katy Perry, who’ll be 40 in October, enters the latest chart at No. 6 with her album 143.  Her first new music in over four years moved just 48,000 units despite the high profile Perry has kept as the recent host of American Idol and the hype the new album received with several singles preceding its release.  

Her total represents a 73% drop from the 180,000 units her last chart topper, Witness, moved in its first week in 2017, the same year Future had record-setting back-to-back debuts at No. 1 with his self-titled album and HNDRXX.  Conversely, Mixtape Pluto’s 129,000 unit count represents only a one percent drop from the average first-week number of Future’s two 2017 albums (130,500 units).

Future’s formula isn’t flashy or even particularly innovative anymore.  In fact, it’s almost impressively repetitive.  He’s the king of trap nihilism, and his fans love him for it. The beats are dark, the delivery is deadpan, and the topics are well-worn.  He doesn’t push boundaries and he doesn’t break any new ground.

But there must be comfort in that, right?  When you press play on a Future album, you know exactly what you’re getting — a soundtrack for when the world feels bleak, and self-medication seems like the only remedy.  It does for this generation’s hip-hop fans what Pink Floyd did for rock diehards a half-century ago (and few of Future’s critics would dare denigrate those Rock and Roll Hall of Famers).

All of this goes to show that, no matter how familiar the message, how drone-like the cadence, or how repetitive the trap beats, Future isn’t trying to change his musical past any time soon.  His stubborn consistency is its own form of rebellion.  His music is the sonic equivalent of the never-ending cycle of lean and heartbreak he raps about: monotonous, yes, but hypnotic and alluring to the audience he’s targeting. 

The formula clearly isn’t broken — Future is perched atop this week’s Billboard 200 for the eleventh time — so why fix it?

Here are the first-week performances of all eleven No. 1 albums by Future (all since June 2015):

DJRob

Ps: Djrobblog does not endorse many of the themes contained in Future’s music, nor does the blogger believe that Future himself fully engages in the lifestyle he raps about.

DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog and on Meta’s Threads.

DJRob (@djrobblog) on Threads

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