Here's another hip hop album to go along with my last post, but this time it's the candidate for my least favorite album I've gotten this year. The Low End Theory is an undisputed hip hop classic. But despite liking a few of the songs a fair amount, I can't seem to make it through the full album without feeling really annoyed and sick of it.
The "beats" on this album (ok, I still really hate that term) are a lot more minimalist and one-dimensional than most of the other hip hop I've listened to so far. For the most part the music just consists of a simple bass line. The album is usually considered "jazzy" by fans, although it's a pretty superficial resemblance. Nothing wrong with minimalism, but in that case the lyrics really have to carry the songs, and for me they just don't.
For one thing, there's the cringe-worthy choruses of a few songs, like "Butter" ("It's like butter baby, it's like butter" etc) or "Jazz (We've Got)" ("We've got the jazz, we've got the jazz" etc), or some terrible R&B style vocals on one of them.
But besides that, the lyrics themselves just don't sit well with me. I'm not going to pick through it, but I can barely think of a line that stands out as being especially cool or interesting. The overall vibe seems to be that A Tribe Called Quest are normal guys who are good at rapping and successful with women. Whatever. It seems really middle of the road. It's also weird that most of the (few) swears are edited out. As far as I can tell, all versions of the album are like this.
I'd give it the benefit of the doubt that it's a good album and it's just not what I'm looking for right now.
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