Lexa Gates’ “What You Wish For” Is a Deadpan Look at Small-Time Success

Everybody wants to be successful, but it’s easy to forget that success can also mean becoming newly busy as hell. Obligations and responsibilities pop like blisters, naps and hangouts with old friends have to be scheduled months in advance, and that new book or streaming series you just started? Yeah, it’s clipped. Queens rapper and singer Lexa Gates understands these mixed blessings more than most. For the last several years, she’s been honing a deadpan delivery that blurs the line between indifference and closely guarded tenderness. Her songs have the sort of conversational flow that happens between friends over club sandwiches and fries at a nondescript 24-hour diner. “What You Wish For,” a standout from her latest album Elite Vessel, looks at her still-rising star with dryly funny malaise. 

Writing about the difficulties of your own popularity can be tricky, but  Gates does it well, in part by taking the piss out of minor inconveniences. “Prolly gotta take a fat shit ‘fore I leave/Type in a rush, bitch hush, check please,” she says, highlighting a silly but relatable problem early on. For all the issues she faces—backstabbing friends, sleepless nights, constantly traveling from event to event—she reminds herself how things could’ve gone wrong: “It’s a lot better there, wherever you at now/Lucky you ain’t die and reincarnate as a cow.” Gates’ worries are serious until they’re not, little thought bubbles cushioned by the steady piano and breakbeat of producers Pierce Allen and Carrtoons. The problems she catalogs aren’t quite superstar-level yet, but as long as she keeps that Queens-bred resilience, they might be soon.