by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
I remember my senior year of high school, when I took a blow-off class called History of Rock, Pop and Jazz.
One day the teacher said rap wasn't music. He also wondered out loud if there would ever be a classic, legendary rock band again, like Foreigner or Journey. This alone made me hate rock 'n' roll in all of its pathetic lameness forever and pray rap could fill this new void in my life.
So if rap's mission is to impress me, then E-40's album My Ghetto Report Card gets a D. I don't know if E-40 got lazy, too rich, or too old, but it just doesn't sound like he's trying anymore.
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First of all, you can't have the same beat for 10 songs in a row. It gets boring and monotonous. And without any silent space between tracks, it becomes almost impossible to tell when one lackluster song ends and another begins. The only difference between most of these songs is the keyboard parts, and they're not good enough to keep things interesting.
It would help if the chosen beat for this album were actually creative, but it's not. I only needed about two minutes of it, but instead I got half an hour. E-40 refers to his particular genre of rap as "Hyphy," describing it as similar to crunk but more up-tempo. If that means he has to do the same lame beat on every track, then I'd tell him to give it up.
The lyrics don't have enough variety, either. You can get away with less-than-inspired beats as long as every track means something. But these don't. On half the tracks I have to wonder, why is this song on the album? What role does it play? Most of the time I can't come up with an answer.
E-40's legendary slang - "pop ya collar," "it's all good," "fo' shezzy, fo' shizzle" and "what's up pimpin'" are all attributed to him - isn't enough to keep this album going. The rhymes are good for the most part, and all the guest artists pull their weight as far as rap goes, but without creative beats or significant meaning, their skills go to waste.
Maybe E-40 just got too mainstream. The album is produced by Lil Jon for anything-but-independent BME Recordings - a division of Time/Warner/AOL/Satan/And Probably Your Grandma Too. It's a sad fact, but all mainstream music today is a disease. I don't know what committee on the 70th floor of an office building in New York decided that the public hated creativity, but they should all be hunted down, put in cages and forced to take experimental drugs for hemorrhoids until they say they're sorry.
I just can't respect an album with track titles like "GetTheF***On.com Part 2," "Sick Wid It II" - what happened to Sick Wid It Part One? - or anything with the word "Boi?" You're not Avril Lavigne, E-40, and you shouldn't try to be. Plus, there are a total of three "skit" tracks on the album, a concept that's never worked. If they were funny, I'd understand, but they're not, so they're pointless.
Just because there's a lack of decent music out there doesn't mean we should lower our standards. E-40 must have produced better work in the past, because he never would have become a Bay-area legend if he'd started out like this.
