Future is a man of many nicknames: Pluto, Super Future, The Wizard, Future Vandross — the list goes on. But no moniker carries more weight for the four-time GRAMMY nominee than Future Hendrix, a brutally honest, R&B-leaning alter ego.
One week after the release of his self-titled fifth studio album, Future was back with his follow-up effort, HNDRXX. The 2017 album displayed Future tapping into his rhythmic side more than at any point during his career, with features from The Weeknd, Rihanna, Chris Brown and Nicki Minaj.
A shock at the time of its release, HNDRXX was a project years in the making, one that would go on to make history and reinvigorate an entire subset of hip-hop.
"I just reflected on it and was thinking about doing this since the end of last summer. I started thinking about how I wanted to put the project out," he told Billboard in 2017. "I didn't know because it was so much music coming out. I wouldn't know the space and timing that I would have for the music."
Well before the full emergence of Future Hendrix, half a decade before HNDRXX came to fruition, Future made his desires to dive into the R&B realm — specifically with a project named after his alter ego — abundantly clear.
“I want to say [Future Hendrix] will be more R&B based, but it's going to be more substance, more passion — just more down with feeling. I know my fans who've been down for me from day one, they understand the growth, and they gonna know when they hear Future Hendrix,” Future explained to HipHopDX in 2012. “They'll know that I'm not selling out…they're gonna understand that I'm doing music that was already happening. But I'ma still have street songs.”
Future changed the title of his second studio album from Future Hendrix to Honest, but songs like “I Won,” “Never Satisfied” and the album’s title track served as the soft launch for what became the world’s grand introduction to Future Hendrix years later.
The fusion of R&B and street rap was a proven success well before HNDRXX — Ja Rule utilized the formula in the early 2000s to earn four GRAMMY nominations — but what Future did in 2017 was different. Hits such as “Comin Out Strong” with The Weeknd and “Selfish” with Rihanna saw Future incorporate R&B and pop elements to make radio-friendly hits while still maintaining the grittiness of his self-titled album and mixtape campaigns.
Instead of entering the family-friendly world of his pop star features, Future provided an outlet for pop to have a dark side.
“I know she wanna be poppin' all over the 'Gram/ When the cameras come out, wanna hold my hand,” The Weeknd sings, just one year removed from his hit album, Starboy. “Must be out of your mind, do you know who I am?”
Between The Weeknd’s iconic feature and Rihanna’s beautifully sung hook of “let’s be selfish,” Future unveiled a toxic update to the R&B and street rap crossover formula. And as a result, history was made.
With his self-titled album and HNDRXX, Future became the first solo artist to achieve back-to-back No.1 debuts in successive weeks in the history of Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart. He also became the first artist to succeed himself at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 at all since 1968. FUTURE and HNDRXX placed the Best Rap Performance winner alongside the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, the Monkees, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, and Peter, Paul & Mary as the only acts to ever achieve the feat.
Five years later — through acts like Gunna, Lil Durk, Moneybagg Yo, Roddy Ricch, and countless others — the influence of Future Hendrix remains audible.
