«Whole Lotta Red is certainly the hip-hop album of the year. What could represent 2020 better than something so grating that feels like it’s never going to end?» (Beats per Minute)
Beats per Minute gets it right: the album is overhyped, exaggeratedly long with 24 tracks and exhausting with 63 minutes of annoying noise, despite a third of the disc being short cuts under two minutes. Most of this noise is painful for the ears to hear, it's deeply irritating and annoying. I personally believe that much of the credit is due to the drums, but everything around them certainly doesn't help.
Five seconds after the start of the first song, I sense that it will be one of the most difficult listening of the whole year, the snare drum is already killing my brain: on this "sound", there's a guy with a childish voice repeating a single line like a broken record, then muttering something in a confused way for a few minutes. Well, the first song has passed. The second one arrives, practically identical to the previous one, there's the same drum. Luckily, Kanye arrives and spits something out; man, I don't even care what he's saying. I don't care, I'm not listening to him. It's an immediate and necessary breath of oxygen. I need that damn oxygen, but what? He just left, and I'm back in reserve. It's a problem, because the situation doesn't improve: as already pointed out by so many reviewers, it's as if there were the same song 24 times, for over an hour, and the first few seconds of each track are basically the same. With the same drum. The same adlibs. The same bars, maybe the letters change, but the lines look the same. I don't know. I'm not understanding anything. Drums, rhythms, hooks, deliveries and adlibs are all ridiculous and embarrassing. Always. I'm not talking about samples. They're practically never present and when they're present, you regret the moments when they aren't there.
In one of the moments of maximum suffering, Kid Cudi arrives, more oxygen: is easily a poor performance, but it's also one of the two best on the record, along with that of his friend Kanye. From there, it takes a few minutes to get to the last guest: Future mumbles something over a slightly different rhythm from the previous ones, I can't understand how it's different, because the drum is always the same; oh, there's a sample, and it's an ideal sample for a homicide-suicide. The summary of the next 14 tracks, is that I got to the end, somehow: to note "Control", one of the less bad choices of the disc, where Playboi Carti sings with an almost melodic rhythm. The rest is easy to describe: musically, it's bad in every respect, lyrically, it's irrelevant, harmful and meaningless. The performer says nothing for over an hour with his annoying style, and the little that can be understood is, at best, average. Overall, the disc has no value and any possible further adjectives would be redundant: in the last days of one of the worst years human history can remember, this guy gives away one of the worst trap albums ever.
Rating: 0.5/10.
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