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