Swizz Beatz f/ Drag-On - "Bust Ya Gunz" (mp3)
Sometimes I feel like my great crusade as a critic right now is to rage against the incredible shrinking rap album. For a decade everyone bitched about how they were getting too long, that bloated 75-minute albums half-full of skits were killing hip hop. And if the trend had started reversing itself back in the 90's, sure, we might have ended up with a few more Illmatics, but it didn't start until about 2 years ago, spearheaded in large part by Jay-Z's leadership at Def Jam. And by that point, the mixtape market had saturated to the point that every artist put out dozens of tracks every year regardless of whether they dropped an album, and making albums shorter and even less comprehensive of the artist's output is, in my opinion, some bullshit. If anything, the labels should be putting out as much music as possible to keep up with the black market, slapping those promotional mixtapes on as limited edition bonus discs and everything.
Instead, we get shit like One Man Band Man, an album from a guy who's produced and/or appeared on dozens of hits in the past year or, and yet is itself a paltry 38 minutes: 10 songs, plus a remix and an inexplicably pointless voicemail message from Snoop Dogg. Swizz might be a bad example, since he's just barely a rapper and probably the kind of person that people would expect a short, fun album from. But this is just kind of insultingly slight, especially considering that he farmed out most of the beats to other producers, and makes me wonder if he just wasn't willing to use too many beats he could be selling to rappers for six figures and throw them into an album he might not even recoup on. My ideal Swizz album would probably involve a bunch of crazy 6-minute tracks full of circular chants and dance instructions like "Get Me Bodied," along with a dozen more 2-minute bursts of energy like "It's Me, Bitches." Considering the guy's work ethic and how many songs he'll make in a day, it seems kind of shitty to push back an album for half a year and then drop something that he could've put together in a long weekend.
I will say that Swizz at least has great taste in beats, and most of the ones he picks are so consistent with his own aesthetic that you have to check the liner notes to distinguish them from his own beats. I've been thinking lately about how this year might be the point where producers, and specifically producer/rapper/auteurs, have officially started to overpower mere MCs in at least music industry juice. Look at that Forbes "hip hop cash kings" list, where more than half of the top 10 were guys known primarily as producers, or the VMA's last week, where the three hip hop artists who were treated like royalty were Kanye and Timbaland (who have two of the biggest albums of the year) and Dr. Dre (who would have one of the biggest albums of the year if he ever dropped it). Swizz isn't quite in that league, and I don't know if he'll ever be, but he came back bigger than anyone ever expected, and I'm sure as hell more into his album than Shock Value.
The album's best non-single is one of those outsourced beats, by Needlz, and in fact "Bust Ya Gunz" might be one of my favorite beats of the year. Swizz brings out Drag-On, and it's kind of admirable that he seems committed to spreading his current midas touch around to every RR artist he worked with back in the day, whether or not their careers are beyond saving. Drag-On sounds a little different than he used to, but more significantly, he's decided to start pronouncing the "dash" in his name, which we learn when he and Swizz say it 4 times in "Bust Ya Gunz," the first three "Drag Dash"es all in the space of 8 seconds. In a weird way, Swizz does come off humble and self-deprecating enough that maybe after all the artists he's worked with he actually would get geeked out enough about getting a call from Snoop to play it for people or put it on his album. On "Bust Ya Gunz" when he says "you don't know me but Kanye know my name/ Timbo know my name/ Pharrell know my name/ Scottie know my name," I was like wow, does he really think he's not just less famous than Scott Storch, but so much so that he has to namedrop him as a producer he knows? Granted, I was surprised to see how well Storch does in a side by side comparison in Google Trends, but still, Swizz might be selling himself short.
Sometimes I feel like my great crusade as a critic right now is to rage against the incredible shrinking rap album. For a decade everyone bitched about how they were getting too long, that bloated 75-minute albums half-full of skits were killing hip hop. And if the trend had started reversing itself back in the 90's, sure, we might have ended up with a few more Illmatics, but it didn't start until about 2 years ago, spearheaded in large part by Jay-Z's leadership at Def Jam. And by that point, the mixtape market had saturated to the point that every artist put out dozens of tracks every year regardless of whether they dropped an album, and making albums shorter and even less comprehensive of the artist's output is, in my opinion, some bullshit. If anything, the labels should be putting out as much music as possible to keep up with the black market, slapping those promotional mixtapes on as limited edition bonus discs and everything.
Instead, we get shit like One Man Band Man, an album from a guy who's produced and/or appeared on dozens of hits in the past year or, and yet is itself a paltry 38 minutes: 10 songs, plus a remix and an inexplicably pointless voicemail message from Snoop Dogg. Swizz might be a bad example, since he's just barely a rapper and probably the kind of person that people would expect a short, fun album from. But this is just kind of insultingly slight, especially considering that he farmed out most of the beats to other producers, and makes me wonder if he just wasn't willing to use too many beats he could be selling to rappers for six figures and throw them into an album he might not even recoup on. My ideal Swizz album would probably involve a bunch of crazy 6-minute tracks full of circular chants and dance instructions like "Get Me Bodied," along with a dozen more 2-minute bursts of energy like "It's Me, Bitches." Considering the guy's work ethic and how many songs he'll make in a day, it seems kind of shitty to push back an album for half a year and then drop something that he could've put together in a long weekend.
I will say that Swizz at least has great taste in beats, and most of the ones he picks are so consistent with his own aesthetic that you have to check the liner notes to distinguish them from his own beats. I've been thinking lately about how this year might be the point where producers, and specifically producer/rapper/auteurs, have officially started to overpower mere MCs in at least music industry juice. Look at that Forbes "hip hop cash kings" list, where more than half of the top 10 were guys known primarily as producers, or the VMA's last week, where the three hip hop artists who were treated like royalty were Kanye and Timbaland (who have two of the biggest albums of the year) and Dr. Dre (who would have one of the biggest albums of the year if he ever dropped it). Swizz isn't quite in that league, and I don't know if he'll ever be, but he came back bigger than anyone ever expected, and I'm sure as hell more into his album than Shock Value.
The album's best non-single is one of those outsourced beats, by Needlz, and in fact "Bust Ya Gunz" might be one of my favorite beats of the year. Swizz brings out Drag-On, and it's kind of admirable that he seems committed to spreading his current midas touch around to every RR artist he worked with back in the day, whether or not their careers are beyond saving. Drag-On sounds a little different than he used to, but more significantly, he's decided to start pronouncing the "dash" in his name, which we learn when he and Swizz say it 4 times in "Bust Ya Gunz," the first three "Drag Dash"es all in the space of 8 seconds. In a weird way, Swizz does come off humble and self-deprecating enough that maybe after all the artists he's worked with he actually would get geeked out enough about getting a call from Snoop to play it for people or put it on his album. On "Bust Ya Gunz" when he says "you don't know me but Kanye know my name/ Timbo know my name/ Pharrell know my name/ Scottie know my name," I was like wow, does he really think he's not just less famous than Scott Storch, but so much so that he has to namedrop him as a producer he knows? Granted, I was surprised to see how well Storch does in a side by side comparison in Google Trends, but still, Swizz might be selling himself short.
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on Monday, September 17, 2007 at 10:51 AM.
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