Tink: "Ratchet Commandments"
OK, it’s true: “Ratchet Commandments” is not the most enlightened piece of music to come from ascendant 19-year-old rapper Tink. Backed by a bouncy beat issued by exec producer Timbaland, she riffs on Biggie’s “Ten Crack Commandments” to knock fellow millennial women for a number of reasons: being too needy for attention on Instagram, being too promiscuous, spending too much time at the club. But while the shaming is pretty much exclusively petty, it’s still flat out impossible to ignore Tink’s flow, the true virtue of the rising Chicagoan’s music that’s fueled a currently unstoppable (and warranted) hype train. Tink is unpredictable in a rubberneck kind of way, and it’s there on “Commandments”, too, when she quickly slips from a crooning, Mean Girls-lifted “you can’t sit with us” to another relentless blitz on those aforementioned Instagram girls. It feels breathless, pressing, inescapable.
But what propels “Ratchet Commandments” beyond a mere paltry strike against other women occurs in its final verse, when she flips it and points out that men, too, are often just as ratchet as women. “You fake fathers never held your daughters/ Never had a conversation/ Too immature to get an occupation,” she raps, providing bold-faced reasoning as to why this designated “generation of ignorance” seeks so much validation on social media in the first place. “Commandments” may fall short in its more disparaging lyrics, but Tink’s acuity at the mic and willingness to subvert the narrative at the last minute is worth the price of admission.
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