Wiz Khalifa is a 23-year-old kid from Pittsburgh. You might know him from his Pittsburgh Steelers anthem, "Black and Yellow." He's got unkempt hair and a preference for raggedy skater clothes, and he likes weed a lot; in a recent interview, he bragged that he spends $10,000 a month on the stuff. He raps in a barely conscious giggly mumble that usually trails off into a sticky singsong. And in a roundabout sort of way, he might be the future of rap.
Amazingly, that's probably a good thing.
Wiz connects, at some level, because he doesn't sound like a star rapper. He's not calm, steely, in control. He's spun-around and dazed, lost in his own murmur. On the 2010 mixtape Kush and Orange Juice, he raps over samples of music he might've encountered on a weeded-out channel surf like the Garden State soundtrack, the Camp Rock soundtrack.