Buddies

Most songs that open an album announce a mood. "Buddies" does something stranger: it throws a party for one person and invites everyone to attend. Quelle Chris sets a swaggering, self-congratulating voice over a loose, jazzy groove, and then lets the listener slowly work out who exactly is being celebrated, who is doing the celebrating, and how sturdy any of it really is.

It is an early statement for a record that spends its running time moving from performed confidence toward something quieter and more honest. Hearing it as a joke misses half of it. Hearing it as a sincere pep talk misses the other half. The song lives in the gap between the two.

Where the song sits

"Buddies" appears on Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often, which Quelle Chris released on February 10, 2017, through Mello Music Group.^[3] The record runs seventeen tracks and about an hour, with a guest list that includes Roc Marciano, Homeboy Sandman, Denmark Vessey, Jean Grae, and Elzhi.^[3] "Buddies" itself was produced by Ayepee and lasts under four minutes, placing it right at the front of the sequence, just behind a brief intro.^[3] Student press coverage of the album singled it out as the ideal on-ramp to the trip that follows.^[2]

The album arrived in the middle of a busy stretch for Chris, a Detroit rapper and producer whose real name is Gavin Christopher Tennille.^[4] He came up through the city's hip-hop scene with the group Wasted Youth and later formed Crown Nation with Denmark Vessey, and he wrote songs for Danny Brown before committing to his own records.^[4] By 2017 he already had several solo releases behind him, including a collaborative album with the producer Chris Keys in 2015.^[4] This one was billed as something more personal and more structured than what came before.

That structure matters. One reviewer described the album as a concept record that follows Chris's inner life from false confidence to real self-affirmation.^[2] If that arc is the spine of the album, then "Buddies" is the first vertebra: the part where the confidence is still false, or at least still unearned.

A sound that flatters and wobbles at once

NPR's review described the track as a quirky expression of self-love riding a jazzy bass loop with horn stabs.^[1] That description is accurate, and it hints at why the song works. The music is warm and a little lopsided. The bass loop gives the track a bounce, and the horn hits arrive like small bursts of applause. It feels like a room full of people cheering, except the cheering has a slightly off-kilter timing, as if the crowd is not entirely sure when to come in.

That looseness suits the performance. Chris does not rap like a man who has everything figured out. He raps like a man rehearsing being that person, trying the posture on and checking the mirror. The delivery leans into the comic energy of rap boasting while stretching it past the point of believability. The humor is real, but it has an edge of nerves.

PopMatters, reviewing the album, characterized it as an off-kilter tour through revivalist and forward-thinking hip-hop by a Detroit rapper working through self-doubt.^[5] "Buddies" is where that off-kilter quality is first established. The listener learns what kind of record this will be: one where the production is inviting but never quite settles, and where the jokes carry weight.

Self-love as performance

The central device in the song is exaggerated self-talk. The narrator talks himself up with such relentless enthusiasm that the praise starts to curdle into something closer to a chant or a mantra. The Johns Hopkins News-Letter's reviewer, who named it a favorite track, noted how the song pushes boastful self-address to an extreme.^[2]

This is a recognizable move in hip-hop, where the braggadocio tradition is almost a founding grammar. But here the boast is turned inward and made strange. Instead of listing accomplishments to intimidate a rival, the speaker seems to be reassuring himself. The audience for the bragging is the bragger. Anyone who has stood in front of a mirror before a hard day, repeating encouraging words, will recognize the scene.

There is a long tradition of the inspirational affirmation, the kind found in self-help books and morning routines, and the song gently pokes at it without sneering. Affirmations work, if they work, because some part of you does not believe them yet. By turning that process into a rap performance, Chris makes the gap audible. The louder the praise gets, the more you suspect what it is covering.

The shifting pronouns

One of the most interesting features of the song, noted by the Johns Hopkins reviewer, is the way the point of view slides around. The words for "you," "me," and "we" blur together, so that it becomes hard to say who is addressing whom.^[2]

That blur does a lot of work. When the narrator is praising a "you," is that a friend, a fan, or the self seen from outside? When the song says "we," does it mean a crowd of allies or the divided parts of a single mind? The title offers a clue. Buddies are companions, and the song seems to ask what happens when the only available companion is your own reflection.

This ambiguity echoes the album's title, which expresses envy toward a version of yourself that you can only admire from a distance. Being you is great, the title insists, and then undercuts the claim by wishing it could be done more often. The pronouns in "Buddies" enact the same split. The self that celebrates and the self that gets celebrated are sharing a microphone, and they are not always in sync.

Cracks in the surface

The reviewer who called the song a self-love chant also observed that its cracks hint at the insecurity underneath, setting the table for the album's journey.^[2] This is the quiet secret of the track. It is funny, upbeat, and catchy, and it is also the sound of someone working hard to convince himself.

Those cracks take the form of shifts in tone rather than explicit confessions. A line of grandstanding is followed by a hesitation, a joke lands with a slightly self-deprecating aftertaste, and the cheerful bounce of the beat keeps going even when the narrator's footing seems to slip. Nothing in the song is spelled out as a breakdown. The effect is more like watching a performer who holds the smile a beat too long.

The rest of the album fills in what the opener only suggests. The same reviewer described its subject matter as self-image, self-doubt, procrastination, loneliness, and mortality, written with humor that persists even on the darkest tracks, and increasingly personal, like pages from a private diary.^[2] Seen in that light, the bravado of "Buddies" is the cover of the diary, bright and decorated, before the entries get frank.

What Chris said about the project

Chris has offered a plain-spoken summary of what he was after. In an exchange with NPR's reviewer, he said the album was about being human: being great, being flawed, being you.^[1] That formulation neatly accounts for the opening track. Greatness and flaw are presented in one breath, and the song refuses to pick a side.

NPR's writer framed the album's answer to the imperfections nobody can polish away as self-acceptance.^[1] The route to that answer is not smooth. Before you can accept yourself, the album suggests, you may have to go through the stage of overselling yourself, then the stage of doubting everything, and only then arrive somewhere calmer. "Buddies" is that first stage, preserved on tape.

Alternative readings

A listener could take the song entirely at face value, as a genuinely joyful anthem of self-regard. There is nothing wrong with that reading. Hip-hop has always made room for the celebration of the self, and for an artist from a city and scene that often get discussed through hardship, a song of unapologetic delight has its own political charge. Taking up space and enjoying it can be a statement.

A second reading hears the track as pure satire, aimed at the genre's bravado and at the culture of curated confidence more broadly. Chris's well-documented comic streak supports this; reviewers consistently note the humor running through his work, including a collaborator's verse on the album that adds to the laughs.^[2] On this view, the song mocks the performance of self-assurance, including the listener's own.

A third reading sits between the two and is probably the most faithful to the album around it. The song is both sincere and ironic at once, because that is how self-encouragement actually feels. You can know that an affirmation is a bit silly and still need it. The track lets both attitudes play at the same time.

Why it resonates

The album's release in 2017 came at a moment when conversations about mental health, anxiety, and the pressure to present a polished self were becoming more open, including in hip-hop. A song that treats confidence as labor rather than a natural state feels well matched to that climate. It gives listeners permission to see their own self-talk as a kind of performance, and to find some comedy and some tenderness in it.

The career that followed adds another layer. Chris went on to a long creative and personal partnership with Jean Grae, who appears on the album; they were engaged in December 2017, married in August 2018, and released the joint album Everything's Fine in 2018.^[4] Hearing "Buddies" with that history in mind, the idea of finding a companion to share the microphone with takes on a happier shading. The solitary pep talk of the opener gradually opens into duets.

Conclusion

"Buddies" is a small song with an unusually large job. It has to introduce a sound, a sense of humor, and an emotional premise, all in under four minutes, and it does so without explaining itself. The cheerfulness is real. So is the nervousness behind it. By letting both ring out together, Quelle Chris sets up a record that understands self-acceptance as a process, with awkward early chapters, rather than a state you arrive at fully formed.

The next time the horns hit and the bass loop settles in, it is worth listening to who the song seems to be talking to. The answer keeps changing, and that is the point.