B.o.B Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray: An Album a Day

An Album a Day is posted 5 days a week, Monday-Friday

Looking at another non rock genre that I quite enjoy, today we are reviewing B.o.B Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray, the debut album by Atlanta rapper B.o.B. This album from 2010 put B.o.B firmly on top of the world, having 4 songs that got major radio play off of this album. Despite always being great at writing catchy songs that would stick in your brain, B.o.B never really seemed at home in the mainstream, for example his first smash hit Airplanes had him rapping about being tired of fame. Eventually his eccentricities drove him out of mainstream, but for about 2 years B.o.B was possibly the biggest mainstream rapper alive, and if it wasn’t for this album I probably wouldn’t be the fan of hip hop that I am today.

           First things first, B.o.B is not your typical rapper and especially not your typical pop rapper. The first way in which B.o.B differentiates himself from the typical rapper is that he’s not only a quality rapper, but also a singer, a guitarist and a pianist. The man doesn’t need any fancy production behind him to flow either, with various videos and tracks showing him rapping along with his acoustic guitar.

            After releasing a multitude of mixtapes that got him a large underground following as an Andre 3000 type of rapper he signed to Atlantic Records’ Grand Hustle imprint. His debut album wound up having 4 hits on it, Nothin On You, Magic, Airplanes and Don’t Let Me Fall. While each of these tracks are great in their own right, the deep cuts off of this record are fantastic as well.

The only real dud on the album is Bet I, just because it gets really repetitive and annoying to me. The best tracks are Don't Let Me Fall, Lovelier Than You and Airplanes Part II.

For Don't Let Me Fall I actually prefer a live in the studio version I found on YouTube to the original, because this is the song that benefits the most from B.o.B’s live band. While the version on the album is good, the electric guitar and backup singers of his live band make it so much better. Plus the image of B.o.B strumming a Gretsch electric guitar and singing/ rapping is really cool to me.

I enjoy Lovelier Than You because it shows off B.o.B’s singing chops as well as his softer side. Instead of having R&B as his softer side like Drake, B.o.B has a full on coffee house acoustic love song. Overall I like this song because it shows some of B.o.B’s dynamics.

The best song off of this album and one of the best B.o.B has ever done is the closing track Airplanes Part II. This track feels like a culmination of the entire album and has many callbacks and similarities to the first version of Airplanes. In this version B.o.B through telling the story of him being a kid in school makes it known that music is all he has and all he has ever had. The thing that sells this track is the guest verse by one of the greatest of all time Eminem.

Eminem slowly fades in on the bridge with his voice overtaking B.o.B in a very smooth transition. His verse is on the same sort of topic as B.o.B, starting off by stating “Let's pretend Marshall Mathers never picked up a pen…”. He builds on that premise for a few lines before taking a turn into his usual angry flow as he describes why he also had nothing but writing raps to get him through his upbringing. Both Eminem and B.o.B seem to also put in there just how unlikely it is that they would have made it as rappers.

Overall this is one of my favorite albums for nostalgic reasons as it was the album that got me into rap music. To this day B.o.B is one of my favorite rappers, even with his penchant for crackpot conspiracy theories. To anybody interested in checking out his work, this album, Strange Clouds, Psycadelik Thoughts and Ether are all worth a listen.Album on Google Play
Album on ITunes
Album on Amazon