XXXTentacion Revenge: An Album A Day

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

    So maybe I’m just old but it seems like rappers are really running out of names. Like we’ve always Lil’ somebody or Big somebody and stuff like that but now we have Kyle. Like his rap name is just his actual first name, and his first name isn’t even something like Madonna or Prince. On the opposite side we have XXXTentacion, a rapper who looks like somebody had his gamer tag first so he added random characters until he found a version that was available. This is a weird dude, he’s kind of like Tech N9ne or Hopsin in that he’s into a lot of dark imagery and will incorporate rock elements, but he’s just weird.

    First off let’s talk about his verse for the XXL magazine freshman class cypher. I personally really like his freestyle here where he goes completely acapella yet still manages to be in time with the beat and does his best speed rap Kendrick Lamar impersonation. His mix of spoken word and speed rapping along with the somewhat disturbing lyrics he comes up with had me half expecting him to succeed in summoning Satan in the middle of the cypher. This freestyle convinced me that the kid had talent, but I’m not sure how his style would work in mainstream rap music.

    So I went and checked out his latest mixtape I could find on Google Play which was Revenge, this mixtape features his breakthrough hit Look At Me as well as a mix of other tracks he’s released on his soundcloud and on other mixtapes. Let me say, Look At Me is terrible, it’s the same generic crap brag rap song that every mumble rapper puts out these days except with edgy try hard lines about killing people. This kid may be the first rapper who actually has a rap sheet who comes off as a phony any time he tries to be a gangsta.

    The next track I Don’t Wanna Do This Anymore sounds like a Lo-Fi Drake track and is just kind of boring. The next three tracks are actually really interesting and cool to me though, they feel like a mix of Kanye West’s 808 and Heartbreak album, black metal production and towards the end of King, even some metal instrumentation. The first of these three tracks, Looking For A Star sounds like something straight off of 808 and Heartbreak with slighter less polished production. The thick robot filter on X works really well with the backing beat.

    The next two tracks feature the lo-fi, recorded with a potato sound that I’ve only heard before on black metal. On the first of these two track, Valentine, the lo fi sound is mixed with the Kanye styled auto tune and singing of the previous track. The mix of these two extremes along with the lyrics that seem to be torn between good and evil, literally between heaven and hell works well at expressing the anguish X feels over his actions even though he can’t decide if he wants to change or not. This ties well into the next track, King which came from the same mixtape that Valentine did.

    This track strips down to nothing but X and an acoustic guitar with the same lo fi production of Valentine. This song seems to be a continuation lyrically of Valentine as it features X moaning that he just wants to go back to before. He doesn’t want to deal with his actions or the suffering which he has experienced. His suffering builds up into the climax of him screaming at the listener over the top of a heavy metal beat before seemingly accepting his role as the villain.

    The next track Slipknot isn’t bad, but it’s fairly standard rap fare, nothing too interesting here. The last two tracks go back to the level of horrible that the opener is, being somewhere between incoherent noise and generic brag rap. Really the only thing on this mixtape worth listening to are the three middle tracks, mostly because of how interesting they are.

    Ultimately this is a pretty crappy mixtape, and I’m really disappointed in X because I was expecting a lot better after hearing his freestyle. Even the songs I like on this mixtape aren’t so much good as they are interesting to me. I feel like this dude would do much better as an emo rocker or metal head than as a rapper, but regardless this mixtape is pretty terrible.

Album on Google Play
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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