freethewave
New member
Whoo kid gives it an 8? lol
Revolver Ocelot
New member
TheGOAT;c-10150121 said:
Rick good for a track or 2 but not a whole album. That shit only works w/ early Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys
Ok, serious review time.
While I was listening to this album, I realized something, or at least put what I knew for a long time in perspective. We need a new genre for some of this shit that disguises itself as hip hop... the Post Malones, Iggy Azealias', a lot of these new niggas, etc. I decided to call this new genre Americana Pop. Americana is a collection of relics and artifacts with American culture based nostalgia. In the case of music, Black music has shaped a huge part of American society, culture and politics. Before, when white ppl and outsiders partook in music, they would take elements of a culture's sound, but they still presented themselves truthfully which gave their music some authenticity. The Beatles, Janis Joplin, Phil Collins, Teena Marie, etc. never spoke with a Black accent, claimed they were from the hood or manufactured anything else that gave Black music its appeal. Even Eminem, who damn near sounded Black when he first came out, spoke from a midwestern lower class white boy's perspective and offered his truth to a generation that wasn't familiar with it. Now, as Nicki Minaj of all fuckin ppl subconsciously pointed out, there's an abundance of white rappers and industry plants that are called rappers but do nothing to associate themselves with the culture rap came from. A lot of us gravitate to it cuz it speaks from our perspective, but those perspectives aren't theirs to begin with... which is fine for entertainment purposes, but now with social media and blogs these dudes have a platform to speak some contrary shit on our behalf. Shittin on OGs, promoting addiction, (ultra) feminism, closeted homoeroticsim, shit that we either have no use for or is detrimental to us. And because we can't tell the difference, we don't speak up about it on a mass level, confuse these plants with a changing generation and allow them to rebuild the foundation of their masters' dead ideas on our culture. So yeah... from here on out these niggas is americana pop artists to me.
Back to this nigga... where do I begin. Walk on Water is a perfect beginning to this clusterfuck. "I can't live up to some imaginary expectations, so I'm gonna work 4 years on some bullshit, scream as loud and rap as fast and offbeat as possible and say I tried my best and hopefully ppl will fall for it". Could've been a decent mid album cut a la The Way I Am, but he dead ass started the album off with this. Delete.
Believe is actually not that bad. A couple of corny punchlines here and there, but this vintage Em. His subject matter actually matches his energy and flow, which made him great in the first place. Plus this will end up being the best beat on the album (happy Shadyteam?) However...
Chloraseptic took everything dope about Believe and made it wack. Matter of fact, it actually makes you realize how wack Believe actually is... "wait a minute, you're just rapping really fast about how much you like to rap... fuck outta here".
Untouchable is also not that bad, but not enough to go back to. Too bad too, cuz he was on point lyrically. The production was just stuck somewhere between 1998 and Mr. Porter's album filler hard drive. I loved the way he flipped the Cheech n Chong sample tho. This needed a K Dot feature badly.
River... if I chewed tobacco, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and posted on Stormfront, this would be my shit. But... the "Shape of You" dude + acoustic guitars + an Exlax line within 8 bars = delete.
The Remind Me intro sounded like a good idea that could've been shaped into a decent song. Then Rick Rubin comes in with his 1985 beat tape and Johnny Cash demos and fucks it all up. Not all his fault tho... in his defense, it's hard to produce a girl song for a dude who sounds like top ranked Call of Duty player trying to buy pussy for the first time. Delete.
The Revival skit is so fire, I'm sorry y'all. I feel like if Em wanted to make a stripped down acoustic album about America, this would've been perfect for the intro. Not everything has to be hard hitting and distorted. A good break in between the fuckery I just heard and the fuckery to come.
Like Home is the whitest thing ever made. The shit is so white, once Em said something along the lines of "throw away your spray tan" before the hook came in, Alicia Keys' Black side walked out the room and turned her into Vanessa Carlton. You can't throw lightweight jabs at white America's champion then make the neo con equivalent of We Are The World, life doesn't work like that. If We As Americans and Big Weenie did the fusion dance and We As Americans took a wrong step, this is what they would form.
Bad Husband sounds like Optimus Prime and Megatron having a armpit fart contest while Stan from American Dad does karaoke. Usually, Em is good at drawing ppl in with his flow and word choice, which gave his stories more impact. Kim, Cleaning Out My Closet, and to some degree Love The Way You Lie is essentially the same song lyrically, but the different ways he approached them make you wanna keep listening (not so much the latter). Here, it's like... fast rapping: check, punchlines: check... we got a song. Shit would be dope if I didn't hear it throughout the whole album. Delete.
Tragic Endings is dope. This is definitely a Recovery throwaway tho, you can tell by the flow, voice and abundance of vocal dubbing (he has a bunch of these on here). Again, he's using what made him great in the past. No corny punchlines here, he's actually telling a coherent story and the flow and vocal projections are matching the emotion. Could be better, but after what I had to go thru to get here, I'm definitely not complaining about it.
The worst thing you can do as an artist is makes something that evokes no emotion in the listener. Framed does just that. He's rapping well, the beat is dope... but I just... don't care.
Nowhere Fast... get this Gym Class Heroes shit the fuck outta here.
Heat... see above. Some of them lines would've gotten a Don Demarco horn in a URL battle tho... still trash. Sidebar: Rick Rubin can mix the fuck outta some guitars, he just needs someone Black in the room to give the drums some soul.
Offended is fire, the beat anyway. I automatically tune out the hook. The only replayable verse is his 3rd tho. Great for a mixtape track/throwaway, bad for a concept album.
If Need Me was on a Twilight soundtrack that my niece was bumpin and I only heard the first minute of it, I'd be slightly interested. But it seems like someone gave this to him as a favor, he really thought he was slick trying to chime in with that obviously prerecorded shit. Plus a "denial is a river in Egypt" line in 2017? Delete.
In Your Head is decent. I fucks with the Cranberries (Salvation>>>>>>>). The first 12 bars and him saying he'd go far as getting hypnotized so he doesn't recognize anyone... sheesh. The 2nd verse had good intentions with him apologizing to his daughter for exposing her to fame, but that shit sounded terrible. Whatever, better than the rest of this weedplate.
Castle is fire. Like Tragic Endings, this sounds like a Recovery throwaway. I like how the verses transition from a father's positive outlook on his future child's life to a mentally drained entertainer at the end of his rope dangling on a decision to take his own life. No complaints here, Em and Khalil came with it. However...
Bette Midler? Bette the fuck Midler my nigga? Dead ass? How the fuck you let Family Guy cover that song better than you? This is all Rick Rubin's fault this time... Em's verses are actually dope, but this beat. This goddam beat. You can here the Rufus Thomas grunt trying to stop this atrocity from fucking up his, Rubin's and Em's legacies. The beat was so wack the whole song rewinded itself to the last track. This sounds like he wrote this for Recovery but waited til now to record it. Delete
While I was listening to this album, I realized something, or at least put what I knew for a long time in perspective. We need a new genre for some of this shit that disguises itself as hip hop... the Post Malones, Iggy Azealias', a lot of these new niggas, etc. I decided to call this new genre Americana Pop. Americana is a collection of relics and artifacts with American culture based nostalgia. In the case of music, Black music has shaped a huge part of American society, culture and politics. Before, when white ppl and outsiders partook in music, they would take elements of a culture's sound, but they still presented themselves truthfully which gave their music some authenticity. The Beatles, Janis Joplin, Phil Collins, Teena Marie, etc. never spoke with a Black accent, claimed they were from the hood or manufactured anything else that gave Black music its appeal. Even Eminem, who damn near sounded Black when he first came out, spoke from a midwestern lower class white boy's perspective and offered his truth to a generation that wasn't familiar with it. Now, as Nicki Minaj of all fuckin ppl subconsciously pointed out, there's an abundance of white rappers and industry plants that are called rappers but do nothing to associate themselves with the culture rap came from. A lot of us gravitate to it cuz it speaks from our perspective, but those perspectives aren't theirs to begin with... which is fine for entertainment purposes, but now with social media and blogs these dudes have a platform to speak some contrary shit on our behalf. Shittin on OGs, promoting addiction, (ultra) feminism, closeted homoeroticsim, shit that we either have no use for or is detrimental to us. And because we can't tell the difference, we don't speak up about it on a mass level, confuse these plants with a changing generation and allow them to rebuild the foundation of their masters' dead ideas on our culture. So yeah... from here on out these niggas is americana pop artists to me.
Back to this nigga... where do I begin. Walk on Water is a perfect beginning to this clusterfuck. "I can't live up to some imaginary expectations, so I'm gonna work 4 years on some bullshit, scream as loud and rap as fast and offbeat as possible and say I tried my best and hopefully ppl will fall for it". Could've been a decent mid album cut a la The Way I Am, but he dead ass started the album off with this. Delete.
Believe is actually not that bad. A couple of corny punchlines here and there, but this vintage Em. His subject matter actually matches his energy and flow, which made him great in the first place. Plus this will end up being the best beat on the album (happy Shadyteam?) However...
Chloraseptic took everything dope about Believe and made it wack. Matter of fact, it actually makes you realize how wack Believe actually is... "wait a minute, you're just rapping really fast about how much you like to rap... fuck outta here".
Untouchable is also not that bad, but not enough to go back to. Too bad too, cuz he was on point lyrically. The production was just stuck somewhere between 1998 and Mr. Porter's album filler hard drive. I loved the way he flipped the Cheech n Chong sample tho. This needed a K Dot feature badly.
River... if I chewed tobacco, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and posted on Stormfront, this would be my shit. But... the "Shape of You" dude + acoustic guitars + an Exlax line within 8 bars = delete.
The Remind Me intro sounded like a good idea that could've been shaped into a decent song. Then Rick Rubin comes in with his 1985 beat tape and Johnny Cash demos and fucks it all up. Not all his fault tho... in his defense, it's hard to produce a girl song for a dude who sounds like top ranked Call of Duty player trying to buy pussy for the first time. Delete.
The Revival skit is so fire, I'm sorry y'all. I feel like if Em wanted to make a stripped down acoustic album about America, this would've been perfect for the intro. Not everything has to be hard hitting and distorted. A good break in between the fuckery I just heard and the fuckery to come.
Like Home is the whitest thing ever made. The shit is so white, once Em said something along the lines of "throw away your spray tan" before the hook came in, Alicia Keys' Black side walked out the room and turned her into Vanessa Carlton. You can't throw lightweight jabs at white America's champion then make the neo con equivalent of We Are The World, life doesn't work like that. If We As Americans and Big Weenie did the fusion dance and We As Americans took a wrong step, this is what they would form.
Bad Husband sounds like Optimus Prime and Megatron having a armpit fart contest while Stan from American Dad does karaoke. Usually, Em is good at drawing ppl in with his flow and word choice, which gave his stories more impact. Kim, Cleaning Out My Closet, and to some degree Love The Way You Lie is essentially the same song lyrically, but the different ways he approached them make you wanna keep listening (not so much the latter). Here, it's like... fast rapping: check, punchlines: check... we got a song. Shit would be dope if I didn't hear it throughout the whole album. Delete.
Tragic Endings is dope. This is definitely a Recovery throwaway tho, you can tell by the flow, voice and abundance of vocal dubbing (he has a bunch of these on here). Again, he's using what made him great in the past. No corny punchlines here, he's actually telling a coherent story and the flow and vocal projections are matching the emotion. Could be better, but after what I had to go thru to get here, I'm definitely not complaining about it.
The worst thing you can do as an artist is makes something that evokes no emotion in the listener. Framed does just that. He's rapping well, the beat is dope... but I just... don't care.
Nowhere Fast... get this Gym Class Heroes shit the fuck outta here.
Heat... see above. Some of them lines would've gotten a Don Demarco horn in a URL battle tho... still trash. Sidebar: Rick Rubin can mix the fuck outta some guitars, he just needs someone Black in the room to give the drums some soul.
Offended is fire, the beat anyway. I automatically tune out the hook. The only replayable verse is his 3rd tho. Great for a mixtape track/throwaway, bad for a concept album.
If Need Me was on a Twilight soundtrack that my niece was bumpin and I only heard the first minute of it, I'd be slightly interested. But it seems like someone gave this to him as a favor, he really thought he was slick trying to chime in with that obviously prerecorded shit. Plus a "denial is a river in Egypt" line in 2017? Delete.
In Your Head is decent. I fucks with the Cranberries (Salvation>>>>>>>). The first 12 bars and him saying he'd go far as getting hypnotized so he doesn't recognize anyone... sheesh. The 2nd verse had good intentions with him apologizing to his daughter for exposing her to fame, but that shit sounded terrible. Whatever, better than the rest of this weedplate.
Castle is fire. Like Tragic Endings, this sounds like a Recovery throwaway. I like how the verses transition from a father's positive outlook on his future child's life to a mentally drained entertainer at the end of his rope dangling on a decision to take his own life. No complaints here, Em and Khalil came with it. However...
Bette Midler? Bette the fuck Midler my nigga? Dead ass? How the fuck you let Family Guy cover that song better than you? This is all Rick Rubin's fault this time... Em's verses are actually dope, but this beat. This goddam beat. You can here the Rufus Thomas grunt trying to stop this atrocity from fucking up his, Rubin's and Em's legacies. The beat was so wack the whole song rewinded itself to the last track. This sounds like he wrote this for Recovery but waited til now to record it. Delete
So yeah... Revival is not a rap album, it's an americana pop album (see first paragraph for definition in case you skimmed thru this). And not even a good one at that. A good americana pop album would be Macklemore's The Heist. It perfectly disguised itself as a rap album, but Macklemore's political bullet points were well stated and captured its intended audience. One thing about Em, he rap. Well. Really well. His mind is a machine when it comes to this rap shit. In fact, that's his Achilles' heel at this point. He lost the ability to transition that skill into great songwriting. Cleaning Out My Closet, Mockingbird, The Way I Am, etc. did not lean on punchlines and generic hooks. Just a frustrated man venting and telling stories. They're not even his best songs skillwise. Here, he's trying too hard to create a perfect verse to appeal to the rap heads and leave the hooks to sway the teeny boppers. That leaves the songs disconnected from any reality of the subject matter... which is the biggest shame of this album seeing what he's talking (domestic issues, police brutality, Trump, career frustration, near death). All I hear is an old man trying too hard to convince himself he can still rap, all while force feeding the pop audience Costco versions of his old shit. Every song on this album is a reincarnation of Encore.
And to the fans of this album (I'm talking to you, Shadyteam... I know you're reading this)... you've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Ran amuck. Led astray. Nigga basically gave you half an album of Recovery throwaways and you all bought it. You can tell some of these songs are old. It's like he realized ain't no sensible human gonna sit there and listen to a 45 year old man rap really fast and loud about raping Melania Trump, pushed back the date just so he can finish those records to salvage this audio colostomy bag. Nigga basically pulled a Canibus in the Dizaster. Spit a bunch of outdated fuck shit that couldn't keep up with the environment around him, choked mid album during the Pink song, and at the end pulled out some old, even more outdated fuck shit to say he at least finished. At this point, he's trying to sell you emotion, but forgot that the music has to be good for that emotion to work. I feel bad that actually wrote all this drawn out shit. Of all the shit I been thru this year that took my time away from sitting down and analyzing the quality music that came out this year, I finally get the time to listen to an album thoroughly, and this is what I get. My bad y'all. Gonna listen to 4:44 and Pressure to get this out my system and restore my faith that old heads can still make quality rap music.
And to the fans of this album (I'm talking to you, Shadyteam... I know you're reading this)... you've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Ran amuck. Led astray. Nigga basically gave you half an album of Recovery throwaways and you all bought it. You can tell some of these songs are old. It's like he realized ain't no sensible human gonna sit there and listen to a 45 year old man rap really fast and loud about raping Melania Trump, pushed back the date just so he can finish those records to salvage this audio colostomy bag. Nigga basically pulled a Canibus in the Dizaster. Spit a bunch of outdated fuck shit that couldn't keep up with the environment around him, choked mid album during the Pink song, and at the end pulled out some old, even more outdated fuck shit to say he at least finished. At this point, he's trying to sell you emotion, but forgot that the music has to be good for that emotion to work. I feel bad that actually wrote all this drawn out shit. Of all the shit I been thru this year that took my time away from sitting down and analyzing the quality music that came out this year, I finally get the time to listen to an album thoroughly, and this is what I get. My bad y'all. Gonna listen to 4:44 and Pressure to get this out my system and restore my faith that old heads can still make quality rap music.
LcnsdbyROYALTY
New member
i ro ny;c-10150697 said:
Fixed
Last edited:
LcnsdbyROYALTY
New member
LcnsdbyROYALTY;c-10134075 said:
This nigga Em trippin...
Ain't no telling how far the value of these dropped after all the critics trashed this album.
CeLLaR-DooR
New member
I've got the app so I read that Guardian review. Straight ether
LcnsdbyROYALTY
New member
CeLLaR-DooR;c-10150777 said:
Lank...
Similar threads
- Turfaholic
- The Reason
- 60
- 61
