Tap The Phone, the newest tune from Teon Gibbs automatically strikes me as an instruction rather than a song title, so I obey. I tap my phone. One notification: Shirley from a small family business has checked out your LinkedIn, but no message. Damn you! Now in a bad mood, I tap my phone again, hitting play and with a rising sound of synth, Gibbs has caught my attention.
With Tap The Phone, Gibbs has encapsulated everything great about the modern rap scene. It’s a song I could imagine being written by someone like Travis Scott, which is obviously a very high compliment to pay, considering his current stature in the music industry. But then if you listen to the track, it’s undeniably in that conversation and wouldn’t be out of place in a playlist with an artist of that calibre.
I listen to Tap The Phone again, and like the dog I am, I touch the screen once more like a good boy. It lights up, no notifications. Why doesn’t anybody love me? Anyway, let’s talk about the specifics of the song; firstly the rhyming scheme. It’s a belter, dragging you in and planting itself in your head with clever lines that are necessarily simplistic in some places, then swimming with complexity in others.
The instrumental on Tap The Phone is catchy and remarkable, and really cements the whole package as a tune you’d hear on a popular radio station. Overall, it’s definitely a thumbs up from us here at Independent Music News. I tap my phone one more time for good luck, and I’ve just had a message from my brother saying he has kidney stones. Maybe no notifications were better. Cheers!
