Studio album number seven for Aaron Phillip, protégé rapper of Jeru the Damaja, born in 1973, from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Some heads should know him, around the early 2000s he came out of nowhere with a name, a cover and guests telling you Wu-Tang, but he was an affiliate of Gang Starr and his debut album was produced by DJ Premier. Crazy, however, despite the premises, his debut had been received lukewarmly by audiences and critics, and was followed by a quite mediocre sophomore, which had the same formula as the previous album and the same feedback, twin even in the charts. Koch Records, very disappointed with the results, did not renew the contract and the rapper was left without a label.
It was 2002. I can't tell you what he's been doing in these 18 years, I don't know and not just in a manner of speaking, I could go and digging in the credits and tell you, but what good would it do? Would it really be worth it? He's a guest on some Croatian and Finnish albums... it was whor, wait, what? Why? I mean, this dude debuted as the only guest on one of the best rap albums of the nineties! What a bad end! He has released four other records to date and apart from some rare excellent guests, they have been unnoticed and poorly executed efforts. Here, Phillip insists. He makes a 70-minute album, 18 tracks, forbidden to go below 3:19 of execution. There's a guest for each track and they're performers you've never heard of, the production is entirely provided by Digital Cut, while the release is the work of the French independent label X-Ray Production.
The first and last songs are the worst of the whole tape. "Unstop" features a boom bap with electro trap vibes, the beatmaker makes a muddled dance club beat, there's nothing hip-hop here, not even the drum machine, it's a dance house track with house synths and slow commercial delivery in an attempt to make the hit. In between these two songs, Afu-Ra only does damage with his guests, who also do not stand out here and are all unknown: StarrLight, Big Shug, Keny Arkana, Mann, Stranjah Miller, Tairo, Dave Dario, Lord Kossity, Jah Mason, Rocca, Sr. Wilson, Skarra Mucci, Sizzla, Lyricson and Charly B. These are all mediocre, but even if there was a decent one, it would never stand out here. Only the girls provide decent performances, to the hooks: Myriam Sow ("Kiss the Pain"), Gavlyn ("Veni See Vici") and Célia Kameni ("Body's Jumping") restore dignity to the project, too bad their space is limited. Lmk gets a little more time and does better with autotune than Afu-Ra without it in "Therapy", the hip dance cut she manages to save.
The rest is messy. Afu-Ra asks, wants, demands commercial success, what everyone is having. Except him. He deserves it. No. There's an infinity of commercial rhythms, boom bap dance, hip dance, hip house, that are the envy of MC Hammer and Lisa Lisa. Afu-Ra's delivery dances (the verb is not accidental) between spoken, sung and rapping, sometimes even during the same track, with results much more than embarrassing and ridiculous. Amateur guests, bad cheap rhythms, lame hooks, absurd samples, nobody helps him, he's alone: when yet another hip house / dance boom bap arrives, more or less to song number seven, you understand that his worrying modus operandi is running out and that Benson and Stabler are about to pop up somewhere to put an end to his perverse madness.
And instead, for some sort of technical quibble, this guy imposes himself on eleven other tracks, this album never ends. In this second part, there are no more female guests and things to save suddenly disappear: Dave Dario offers a pop / rnb / soul hook in the tenth pick, but it's not the same thing; there's a light sad piano and a skeletal slow drum, but the track is completely ruined by Afu-Ra's cumbersome and indecent slow syncopated delivery, who chooses to go towards the soulful attempt. Followed, not one, not two, well, four hip dance productions, even on the ragga joint, can't do any damage if the whole album is already that bad.
With the arrival of "Firetricity" we begin to see the light, the end of this absurdly obscene project: it can be taken as an example, now, look, I don't remember anything about this track and I don't want to listening again, but I note it as a hardcore tone with beat confused and cheap, frantic rapping, reggae vibes. See, see how nothing has to do with the rest, it's all random in this project. At this point, I wonder who really managed to take it to the bottom, because song number sixteen is another soulful choice, always bad, before yet another hip dance piece, there are never enough, and the final eighteenth song to which I already mentioned a few minutes earlier.
The title track, featuring Big Shug & Keny Arkana, is one of the best cuts on the record because it's just mediocre and not bad. Stranjah Miller, Sr. Wilson and Charly B (French singer who you may not find credited with "Me and My Sensi", light hip dance cut; to make you understand the level of this effort) are called for the inevitable ragga fillers, something that I could accept in 1995, but not in 2020. Inglorious fall for this former Gang Starr affiliate. This effort is impressive, in a negative sense: serious candidate for worst hip-hop album of the year.
Rating: 2/10.
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