Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (261 of them)
its good for his profile, but not sure gunplay works that well with mustards precision style of production, doesnt sound like hes totally into it. also, when i saw it was produced by mustard, i was pretty excited, but its just a bit too typically mustard (and a bit after-the-fact)
― StillAdvance, Wednesday, 20 May 2015 09:41 (eight years ago) link
two months pass...
yeah it's weak, and dark dayz is definitely the best track by a long way. he's sounds really tired. you can tell right from the intro track - and I love absurd self-aggrandising statements of intent, but its without the sort of punch that sort of track needs. he regularly cedes ground to underwhelming guests and only appears as if reluctantly on some songs. that's crazy, he's usually all over his tracks like a terrier, other guests basically having to get him to pipe down ('don't say a sound, gunplay!'). the production around his voice is oddly cotton-wool like on a number of songs, with rick ross (who i find tedious generally) out-gunplaying gunplay on Be Like Me.
he's always been open to comic self-dramatisation - it's one of his best aspects ('What the fuck is Gunplay thinking? What he drinking? Moonshine?!). In fact he frequently comes across as a bit of an ADHD goofball (as numerous interviews and that six flags vid attest, even the nazi stuff, christ), giving a requisite salt to the ultraviolence. a surprising number of his songs involve him coming off second-best: failure and the cussed nature of things often attend the hi-octaine hysteria and hustle.
here that self-dramatisation and cocaina-laced-with-failure attitude becomes a mood of self-pity and recrimination, mainly about the court case he ended up spending his album advance on (among other things you presume). as well as those local circumstances for the uncharacteristically low-key mood, you just feel Gunplay isn't an album person, and that this 1st album has been hanging round his shoulders like lead weights. His mixtapes have always been uneven anyway - it's almost like the album is too self-important a form for him, without enough room for him to just mess around.
at his very best - bible on the dash, the guest on cartoon & cereal, it feels like taking his nervous system to the edge is the instrument he plays (see also Take This). It's the sound of someone running out of fuel, surviving on surviving, and it's unsurprising that's the sound that's most successful on the album. aside from dark dayz, blood on the dope's probably the next best - edgy, end-of-the-road, heist-gone-wrong game's-up desperation, the central image the only thing that matters any more.
dark dayz is the sound of someone on the outside again (as he always has been in a way - slightly older than his peers, congenitally self-destructive), always *just* on the wrong side of the edge between failure and success. 'Straight rum and cake crumbs, not enough birthdays and way too many graves dug' is how he describes where he came from and one of the best lines on the album. And although he goes on to brag about the money he has now, the main message is of someone still having to work the music game with the drug game, in an increasingly reductive pairing: 'So close to just being another stat, being another cat who got capped in his cap, just another a dealer with a 9mm. Can't blame me if I still sound a little bitter.' He's continually *just* evading oblivion and destruction, and knows that that's not a game he can keep on playing. The continually hanging 'they may there to hurt you...' in the chorus, suspended momentarily over the sparse piano and strings, is great - bravado in the face of existential uncertainty is one of his best sounds.
he's like a one-man jim thompson story basically, and there's a weird fascination to listening to this underperforming long player - the sound of the consequences of his life. Maybe Living Legend is the right title in a way - legends usually have the work that established them behind them, and survive of that work. you wonder if he can come back again really, though that is after all the place he seems to thrive best.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 1 August 2015 08:56 (eight years ago) link
seven months pass...