The mattress is a canvas. For most of Future’s career, vacuum-sealed packages and hastily-stuffed fistfuls of money have played on a continuous loop, while sex, love, and heartbreak take the foreground. (He hasn’t merged the bed’s many uses the way Havoc did with “Blow you off the atlas as if I caught you fucking my wife on my thousand dollar mattress,” but really, who has?) On “Inside the Mattress,” from his surprise mixtape Purple Reign, Future starts to mesh the personal and the less-than-legal, before breaking fully into a confession.
The song is produced by Nard & B, the Atlanta duo who have crafted some of Future’s greatest bloodlettings: “You Deserve It,” “Throw Away,” “News or Somthn.” It’s anchored by a line in the second verse: “Hit another city, and another city, I was just grooving/ I was trying to tell you I was losing/ I was gon’ tell you I’m improving.” That was the subtext of the run that started with 2014’s Monster and peaked last summer with Dirty Sprite 2—a cry for help under a whole lot of vitriol.
Later in “Mattress,” Future peels that cover away. “I never told the world about you,” he raps, admitting he would rather hole up in hotels than hit award shows. And the qualifier on all the depressive talk is a curious one. At first pass, “I wake up and do it way better tomorrow” sounds like a self-improvement mantra, but there’s no “try” or “hope” in there, just a mechanical upward spiral that hasn’t stopped, no matter the things that keep him up at night.
Read more at: Pitchfork
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