Lyrically, he still straddles a line between being knowingly bald-faced and straight up showing his ass too often-"Headed to the game for OK seats/ Now I’m courtside at OKC"-but there’s palpable kinetic energy in the way he raps now, spitting in an almost-literal sense, his words splattering across beats in places that he may not even have intended. It’s that quantifiable oomph in Sean’s rapping that makes Dark Sky Paradise feel immediately more substantial than anything he’s released. Not all of Dark Sky Paradise is as successful, but when it’s at its best it feels like it came from the same place: a guy rapping more ferociously than he ever has because he knows that he’s better than he ever was. That song is where everything clicks for Big Sean, and the confidence he seems to derive from fully harnessing his powers seeps from its pores. Put online in September along with three other tracks, the song is an obvious banger with an instantly catchy hook and some truly great lines-"I just bought a crib, three stories, that bitch a trilogy"-that also leverages his broken engagement with "Glee"’s Naya Rivera in a way that feels authentically inspired. The best example of this is "I Don’t Fuck With You", the song that kick-started the album and perhaps saved Sean’s career as we know it. But it is by many lengths his best album, and the first one that gets closest to hitting an elusive sweet spot where his music works as mindless fun while still leaving you just enough to chew on. Big Sean has an appeal, but that is not it.ĭark Sky Paradise, his newest, does not wholly shed his aspirations for a certain level of legitimacy, as the nonsensical but very official-sounding title would implicate. Where Sean’s debut Finally Famous was blandly listenable but anonymous-with its big hits driven by guests Chris Brown, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj- Hall of Fame felt like an overcorrection meant to position him as a rapper’s rapper, the kind of guy who you tune into to focus on lyrics. Too little of that persona was present, though, on his weirdly dour and entirely too serious second album. He is the class clown of rap, entertaining or annoying seemingly at random, but just witty enough that he’s enjoyable to have around. Music’s "Mercy"-"ass-quake," "ass-state," "ass-tray"-are his most quintessential lyrics: funny and stupid in not-quite equal measures, but memorable in their shameless goofiness. He is good at being dumb, even if sometimes he is too dumb. Over the course of his career, Sean has honed his on-mic personality into a charming sort of gleeful obnoxiousness.
Hall of Fame was not just a problem commercially, but artistically as well.
0 kommentar(er)
