Outkast and the Goodie MOb got me into Southern rap music back in the mid-‘90s. I’ll even admit that there are a few guilty pleasures on Master P’s gloriously-awful "Ghetto Dope." But I just can’t get into the whole Southern-bounce thing, and its biggest star, Young Jeezy, embodies everything that makes the genre forgettable and indistinct on " The Recession ." At least a dozen of the album’s track use the exact same drum pattern. I get into plenty arguments with people who say that all rap music sounds alike, but I couldn’t argue in Jeezy’s case: Two out of every three tracks are all gothic synth lines, skittery hi-hats, 808 bass hits and rat-a-tat snares. David Banner fell into this trap on his recent " Greatest Story Ever Told," but at least he had a few political raps and interesting messages to get across. Jeezy simply engages the crack-rap genre at its most generic level. Say what you will about the amorality of groups like the Clipse that extol the upside of the drug game; at least they’re creative about it. Most of "Recession" features similarly-structured hooks (“Blah blah blah, I do THIS , blah blah blah, I do THAT” ) by way of Jeezy’s ashy mid-range tenor, which kind of sounds like a 15-year-old who just smoked a whole humidor full of cheap cigars. Contrary to its title, the album rarely varies from how hard Jeezy is grindin’, and the album’s sole political commentary – aside from “My President,” the second of what I ...
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Outkast and the Goodie MOb got me into Southern rap music back in the mid-‘90s. I’ll even admit that there are a few guilty pleasures on Master P’s gloriously-awful "Ghetto Dope." But I just can’t get into the whole Southern-bounce thing, and its biggest star, Young Jeezy, embodies everything that makes the genre forgettable and indistinct on " The Recession ." At least a dozen of the album’s track use the exact same drum pattern. I get into plenty arguments with people who say that all rap music sounds alike, but I couldn’t argue in Jeezy’s case: Two out of every three tracks are all gothic synth lines, skittery hi-hats, 808 bass hits and rat-a-tat snares. David Banner fell into this trap on his recent " Greatest Story Ever Told," but at least he had a few political raps and interesting messages to get across. Jeezy simply engages the crack-rap genre at its most generic level. Say what you will about the amorality of groups like the Clipse that extol the upside of the drug game; at least they’re creative about it. Most of "Recession" features similarly-structured hooks (“Blah blah blah, I do THIS , blah blah blah, I do THAT” ) by way of Jeezy’s ashy mid-range tenor, which kind of sounds like a 15-year-old who just smoked a whole humidor full of cheap cigars. Contrary to its title, the album rarely varies from how hard Jeezy is grindin’, and the album’s sole political commentary – aside from “My President,” the second of what I ...