There’s something wrong with whatever system I use to analyze the music I’m listening to. My notes for the first run-through of Z-Ro’s Z-Ro vs. The World – invariably my most honest criticism- wrote the work off as thug-rap so one-dimensional it hadn’t yet recognized misogyny and drug-dealing as topics of merit. Upon subsequent listenings, my harsh sentiment had softened to the point where I used the CD as a pick-me-up on my way home from a poor job- interview.
Which leads me to suspect that I don’t give a lot of these rappers anywhere near the shit they deserve for putting out horrible albums. ‘Cuz… some of these albums are songs only a mother could love. A mother that raised a thug like Z-Ro.
Z-Ro’s work is uncompromising and bleak. Its favorite (almost exclusive) topics are crime, poverty, and being a gangster; camaraderie, violence, and competition. He does it with a humorless anger, taking breaks only to commiserate on the empty wonders of well-deserved success. At the time of the publishing of the album, he was the same age I am now.
Z-Ro’s work is different from others in the Houston area, specifically those in the SUC (Screwed Up Click, the remnants of a rag-tag band of fans of DJ Screw). Paul-Wall almost never mentions violence, preferring to spend his time discussing the merits of working hard in order to make a lot of money. Chamillionaire’s favorite topic is how much better of an MC he is than everyone else and how successful he’s been selling his records. Scarface is probably most similar in vein to Z-Ro, but due to his age and veteran status has a wider range, including ideas of psychosis and family, and takes breaks from shouting out harsh threats to hang out with 2Low and let him say things no 13 year old should say. Z-Ro is straight gangster-shit. And while the lazer-like focus leads to a more authentic sound, it also leads to burnout with a quickness. Well, that and the fact that it's hard to listen to.
Apparently, somewhere along the way whoever was mixing the CD decided it was a good idea to down the volume on the instrumentals to a point where you can’t hear them if there’s significant background noise. I think they did this because they realized they were actually using canned sound-effects and non-ironic-synthed-attempts-at-instruments instead of the real thing, and so decided to cleverly disguise their mockery of the ancient art of DJing by convincing an unwitting public that rappers can sing too. Thus, the repeated use of sung hooks and shitty instrumentals.
‘Dirty 3rd’ has Houston’s nigh-patented drum-track beat, with a simple scale synth and a couple suspensenoises I recognized from GoldenEye 64 thrown on the track for variety. ‘Hustling Is All I Can Do’ has what has to be an 8-bit game-system bassoon with a couple of legitimate piano chords thrown in for good measure. ‘Gonna Get Easier’ takes a slower approach to the beat, but still ends up with an early-90’s Dre-like keyboard effect overlaid with a major chord progression. It’s not so much that they sound the same, so much as the tracks sound… simple. This is truly tragic, as Z-Ro’s style, while not being A-quality work, still makes the B-range by sheer virtue of its grit, tenacity, and willingness to vary rate and rhythm.
Z’Ro Sounds gangster. This is really important, because there actually are a lot of rappers out there who can’t quite make the gangster-sound believable (Soulja boy, Akon, Cypress Hill… Snoop Dogg), and it’s usually because their voices lack the appropriate bass quality and aggressive timber. Z-Ro has those, along with the ability to vary his speed, and it makes for a solid performance. He can also sing, and by that I mean he can hit notes on the note, and not slide around or screw up the scale. His singing voice sucks though (see paragraph above as to why this matters). Humorously, the same inflexibility that makes him a good rapper makes him a poor singer. Poor guy.
On my scale from Fresh to SuperCockSucker, I give this album a rating of ‘the fat bitch at the club’. It’s not my first choice, due to its one-dimensionality and the fact that I can’t get really into it, but if it’s the only CD left in the world, yeah, there ain’t nothing wrong with it. Besides, it’s good to curl up to, and if I wake up the next morning it better be making me some damn eggs and bacon or I’m kicking it out of my iPod so fast I’ll leave bootprints on its ass.
Make sure to join me next week as I re-enter the slog of the early 90's with Scarface's 'Mr. Scarface Is Back', if for no other reason than to finally hear the third song in the saga of Mr. Scarface's self-titled tracks.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
GIRL THIS DICK IS SO CLEAN…
…You could boil it in some collard greens.” Is probably one of the more hilarious one-liners off Devin the Dude’s 2007 album Waiting to Inhale. The entire album is filled with them. ‘Matter fact, its gonna be five-hundred for some dick” and “I’d sweep you off yo feet with a box of chocolates but watch it, because it’s really balled up hog-shit”. Honorable mention goes to a lot of quotables on the CD, but nothing really gets vegan chicks so skinny their bikini clad beach-bodies are publically mocked for actually being young boys having lost a dare like referring to your penis being boiled with some veggies that are typically fried afterwards. I mean, when I think about that, it doesn’t even make sense. And that’s really the beauty of it.
Devin the Dude apparently smokes a lot of weed. And when I say a lot of weed, I mean ‘…I bought a whole quarter pound, but that was just today and now I’m down to a dime[bag]’. Most of his lyrics, and all of his songs*, revolve around getting high, or getting laid. Ordinarily, this is a combination I would turn my nose up at like a sexy redheaded Tolnedran princess, but the fact is that Devin’s got the attitude and the self-consciousnessless to make it work for him. The album is really funny.
It is a tribute to his ability to function in society that its humor does not require the listener to be blazed while listening in order to feel like he's in on the jest. Much of it actually revolves around irony. In ‘Just Because’, he outlines a series of awkward ways to kill a woman set to a Barry-Manilow-esque soundtrack, complete with jazz saxophone and airy-keyboard. In ‘She Useta Be’, he describes meeting this super hot chick from high school “150 lbs and 10 years later”… and he still hits that “Because of how she used to look, you know?” ‘She Want That Money’ starts out with him deciding to live within his means AND get laid by propositioning a prostitute… and not paying her.
There’s some good flow, but it’d be a mistake to argue that Devin the Dude shows amazing technical ability or style. He’s not monotonous or tiresome by any means, it’s just that his hooks and lines aren’t his draw; he neither dazzles with dexterity nor baffles with bullshit. Instead, the poetry is really just a canvas for his humor, and his voice.
He sounds Katt Williams had a baby with Mitch Hedberg, midwifed by Dr. Dre and birthed from the womb of none other than Mary Jane herself.
And it's that thin, weak and emasculated voice that angles that extra notion of ‘did he just say…’ into his lyrics to make them funny. It sounds shy and introverted. And then you realize he just inferred he choked a bitch to death with his cock. And not in the ninja way, either.
That said, his instrumentals leave me with the suspicion that, while he spent some time in the studio setting off smoke alarms and then not being able to find them to turn their obnoxious noise off, he spent the rest of the time playing haki-sak with some white kids at a Dave Matthews tribute circle-jerk and accidentally mated one of their acoustic guitars with his sampler-board. A quarter of the beats on this CD have this strangely soothing guitar on them, which leads me to believe that guitar trait is recessive and the sampler was a carrier** for the gene. The rest of the instrumentals are cool though. ‘She Want That Money’ features some electric guitar modding that is as ska as it is minimalistic; “She Useta Be” has this loose saxophone segment that perfectly complements the husky voice of the woman they got to sing the fat bitch's segment; ‘Somebody Elses Wife’ has a Nile-smooth-jazz beat and the only tasteful, non-ironic, actually-useful, seriously-improving-the-song, what-am-i-saying-dear-heaven-strike-me-down-now use of autotune ever.
Seriously. There’s autotune, and it doesn’t suck. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s reserved for choruses and other special moments on the CD like bar mitzvahs and the birthing of first-born sons, but when it does show up, it benefits the work by adding a hypnotic, otherworldly feel to it.
You know what did suck though? ‘Lil Girl Gone’. It’s a song about a pre-pubescent girl running away from home and growing up on the streets in poverty and despair. To say that it clashes with the rest of the album is to imply the asteroid that smashed tons of soot into the earth’s atmosphere 65 million years ago and killed off all the dinosaurs Jesus himself didn’t personally ride into Noah’s ark was in fact a mere ‘boink’ on the earth's crust with a loose bit of space debris. As in: yeah, and then some.
It makes you wonder if someone put him up to this, because Devin only sings the refrain, and I have difficulty believing he didn’t realize it’s totally out of place with the ‘it’s just jokes’ mode of the rest of the album. My honest opinion was that they got to the end of the album and were like ‘damn, we didn’t say nuthin that wasn’t deeper than the papers we usin to roll this blunt with. What should we do?’ and they combined the elements of a country-song to play the heart-strings of the hip-hop community into thinking Devin and crew could reflect on things and think… and feel feelings and shit.
I’m not buying it.
On a one to ten scale, I give this Space Invaders. You know, the video game? It’s fun and enjoyable, but more or less impossible to take seriously. It blunts the sadness when you’re feeling down, it gives you something to laugh at when you’re already smiling, you can jam out with it for hours (by the end of the album, you’ve forgotten what the beginning felt like), and the high score is over 9000 by this point. Expect light-hearted fun, mild to moderate chauvinism, little substance and great levels of substance abuse.
But not nearly as much substance abuse as I'm going to have to perform in order to get through next weeks review: Z-ro's Z-ro vs. The World. Tune in next Friday for more of your weekly hip-hop dose of dope, hope, toasts and mind-numbing run-on sentences.
*See paragraph 9, which starts ‘You know what did suck though…”
**Punnett square
Devin the Dude apparently smokes a lot of weed. And when I say a lot of weed, I mean ‘…I bought a whole quarter pound, but that was just today and now I’m down to a dime[bag]’. Most of his lyrics, and all of his songs*, revolve around getting high, or getting laid. Ordinarily, this is a combination I would turn my nose up at like a sexy redheaded Tolnedran princess, but the fact is that Devin’s got the attitude and the self-consciousnessless to make it work for him. The album is really funny.
It is a tribute to his ability to function in society that its humor does not require the listener to be blazed while listening in order to feel like he's in on the jest. Much of it actually revolves around irony. In ‘Just Because’, he outlines a series of awkward ways to kill a woman set to a Barry-Manilow-esque soundtrack, complete with jazz saxophone and airy-keyboard. In ‘She Useta Be’, he describes meeting this super hot chick from high school “150 lbs and 10 years later”… and he still hits that “Because of how she used to look, you know?” ‘She Want That Money’ starts out with him deciding to live within his means AND get laid by propositioning a prostitute… and not paying her.
There’s some good flow, but it’d be a mistake to argue that Devin the Dude shows amazing technical ability or style. He’s not monotonous or tiresome by any means, it’s just that his hooks and lines aren’t his draw; he neither dazzles with dexterity nor baffles with bullshit. Instead, the poetry is really just a canvas for his humor, and his voice.
He sounds Katt Williams had a baby with Mitch Hedberg, midwifed by Dr. Dre and birthed from the womb of none other than Mary Jane herself.
And it's that thin, weak and emasculated voice that angles that extra notion of ‘did he just say…’ into his lyrics to make them funny. It sounds shy and introverted. And then you realize he just inferred he choked a bitch to death with his cock. And not in the ninja way, either.
That said, his instrumentals leave me with the suspicion that, while he spent some time in the studio setting off smoke alarms and then not being able to find them to turn their obnoxious noise off, he spent the rest of the time playing haki-sak with some white kids at a Dave Matthews tribute circle-jerk and accidentally mated one of their acoustic guitars with his sampler-board. A quarter of the beats on this CD have this strangely soothing guitar on them, which leads me to believe that guitar trait is recessive and the sampler was a carrier** for the gene. The rest of the instrumentals are cool though. ‘She Want That Money’ features some electric guitar modding that is as ska as it is minimalistic; “She Useta Be” has this loose saxophone segment that perfectly complements the husky voice of the woman they got to sing the fat bitch's segment; ‘Somebody Elses Wife’ has a Nile-smooth-jazz beat and the only tasteful, non-ironic, actually-useful, seriously-improving-the-song, what-am-i-saying-dear-heaven-strike-me-down-now use of autotune ever.
Seriously. There’s autotune, and it doesn’t suck. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s reserved for choruses and other special moments on the CD like bar mitzvahs and the birthing of first-born sons, but when it does show up, it benefits the work by adding a hypnotic, otherworldly feel to it.
You know what did suck though? ‘Lil Girl Gone’. It’s a song about a pre-pubescent girl running away from home and growing up on the streets in poverty and despair. To say that it clashes with the rest of the album is to imply the asteroid that smashed tons of soot into the earth’s atmosphere 65 million years ago and killed off all the dinosaurs Jesus himself didn’t personally ride into Noah’s ark was in fact a mere ‘boink’ on the earth's crust with a loose bit of space debris. As in: yeah, and then some.
It makes you wonder if someone put him up to this, because Devin only sings the refrain, and I have difficulty believing he didn’t realize it’s totally out of place with the ‘it’s just jokes’ mode of the rest of the album. My honest opinion was that they got to the end of the album and were like ‘damn, we didn’t say nuthin that wasn’t deeper than the papers we usin to roll this blunt with. What should we do?’ and they combined the elements of a country-song to play the heart-strings of the hip-hop community into thinking Devin and crew could reflect on things and think… and feel feelings and shit.
I’m not buying it.
On a one to ten scale, I give this Space Invaders. You know, the video game? It’s fun and enjoyable, but more or less impossible to take seriously. It blunts the sadness when you’re feeling down, it gives you something to laugh at when you’re already smiling, you can jam out with it for hours (by the end of the album, you’ve forgotten what the beginning felt like), and the high score is over 9000 by this point. Expect light-hearted fun, mild to moderate chauvinism, little substance and great levels of substance abuse.
But not nearly as much substance abuse as I'm going to have to perform in order to get through next weeks review: Z-ro's Z-ro vs. The World. Tune in next Friday for more of your weekly hip-hop dose of dope, hope, toasts and mind-numbing run-on sentences.
*See paragraph 9, which starts ‘You know what did suck though…”
**Punnett square
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