Rapid Fire Reviews: Some Lumpy Mainstream Rap Albums with Kid Cudi, Lyrical Lemonade, and Yeat

I've had people ask me in the past why some of the biggest rap albums around always get lumped into rapid fire reviews. The main reason is that most of them are supremely boring and trying to conjure full reviews on almost any of them would be impossible. An even better reason is that they are so god damn long it's fucking ridiculous. And unlike some of the good long albums I've covered in recent years so many of these records trail over the same territory over and over. So once again, here are some reviews of big rap albums that I don't have the time or patience to cover in full.

INSANO - Kid Cudi

I haven't liked anything Kid Cudi has done in a LONG time. There's a spare track or two off of his 2016 album Passion Pain & Demon Slayin that I thought were pretty good as well as a few Kids See Ghosts songs I think are okay. But for the most part I haven't come away from a Cudi record with positive feelings since literally the first Man On The Moon. I thought this album might be at least slightly more interesting given some of the features it sports, but I was wrong. Even with pretty low expectations this still managed to creep under the bar. This album gets off to an absolutely awful start across three opening tracks that add up to nothing collectively, especially the embarrassing KEEP BOUNCIN'. After a few highlights, we get into the middle of the record which is nearly a wasteland. Starting with CUD LIFE and running all the way until TORTURED there is just absolutely nothing redeemable. I guess the closest thing to an exception is the biggest hit from the record AT THE PARTY which does have sonic elements I like even if it kinda sounds like nobody on the song is really trying. 

Surprisingly the first track on the record I liked was MOST AIN'T DENNIS, a song I saw getting repeatedly clowned online. Sure it's goofy, but everything Cudi does is. At least this one has some compelling sonic progression and memorable refrains. Similarly, A TALE OF A KNIGHT overcomes silliness to become decently catchy and it has some of the only lyrics on the record that feel like they matter at all. I also thing the pop-flavored BLUE SKY is a strong cut deeper on the album that features Cudi's best singing by FAR. There are also a few features I like on the record. A$AP Rocky does his best to save WOW with an impossibly fun and smooth verse. It's kind of nice to hear XXXTENTACION again on X & CUD where his voice is used on a song that at least loosely resembles something he might have made during his life for once. This album is a ROUGH listen. While it isn't completely devoid of anything worth hearing the moments are very few and far between. Somehow the extremely monotonous spacey trap moaning that fills in the gaps is just as offensive as Cudi at his most brash and experimental. Even though I went into this album with low expectations I'm still surprised by just how little of this very long album is worth returning to. 3/10

All Is Yellow - Lyrical Lemonade

This is typically the kind of project I would avoid. Something assembled at the hands of a non-musical collaborator, in this case, Cole Bennett. It's the DJ Khaled/Nigo model of making an album that gets delivered with the same artistic potency of the newest Fast And The Furious movie getting 27 rappers to contribute throwaway beats and verses. But something about this record seemed to hit people beyond just the impressively talented roster of contributors. While I can't say I saw much praise for the entire album there were numerous individual songs I felt I couldn't pass up on. What I wasn't prepared for was just HOW all over the place these 14 tracks were. 

With an album like this the songs are really only as good as their individual contributors. But often overlooked is the fact that the musical collaborators actually have to make sense together. For example, I like Lil Yachty but he appears on two of the worst songs on this album because he makes no sense as a stylistic pairing with Chief Keef on Say Ya Grace and even less sense alongside Gus Dapperton and Joey Badass, who each also make no sense being paired with each other on Fallout. That's not even to mention songs on here like With The Fish, Hummingbird, and Hello There that feature a crippling lack of talent. You could also throw This My Life onto that list if not for a blessed Kid Laroi verse that feels like finding water in the desert. 

So why SHOULD you listen to this record? Well, there are certainly some worthwhile moments. Cordae and Juice Wrld's Doomsday dropped as a single and I still like the song quite a bit. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Sheck Wes, teeing up an XXL Cypher reunion between JID and Ski Mask The Slump God on the opening track. Special features Latto, Amine, and Swae Lee which feels like a volatile collection of talent. Thankfully they seem to have hit the best possible conclusion with a song they all three feel comfortable on. Finally, despite not having loved much of anything I've heard from BabyTron and G Herbo in the past they manage to come through with one of the best cuts here on Equilibrium. Unfortunately, I'm not particularly fond of this record. It does have its moments but even then some of the best material here is shuffled in between far weaker or sometimes outright unbearable songs. This album falls victim to the same kind of inconsistency that's held so many similar albums back in the past without the truly stunning highlights that could help me over look that fact. 4.5/10

2093 - Yeat

I've never been a Yeat fan despite NUMEROUS tries. His completely aimless flows and utter lack of any vocal presence always served as an impenetrable barrier for me even as the writing and production on his music improved over time. And honestly, that improvement has continued. One thing I can say for sure is that 2093 is EASILY Yeat's best work yet and much of that comes from the production which has improved drastically. Take the intro cut Psycho CEO alone which has distinct phases and a vivid musical palette the likes of which most rappers would dream of. Later on the record, he teams up with Lil Wayne for a killer futuristic outing on Lifestyle. I'm also pretty sure that Shade is the best song Yeta has ever made coming through with a genuine intensity that is rare for him and some of the wildest fucking production you'll hear anywhere this year. 

But even with the improvements in composition and production, there is still one inescapable fact about this album. You have to listen to Yeat rapping for 70 minutes, something that really does make me want to peel off my own flesh. To be clear, there's about 40-45 minutes of material here I think is solid, at least listenable. Occasionally Yeat does put some effort into his voice being discernable and sometimes his lyrics even have something to do with each other. At other points, he's so repetitive that it's easier to gloss over him entirely and enjoy the beat he's riding. But there's also a side of this album where Yeat is clearly trying so little and delivering something so laughably bad on the writing and performance front that it feels like he's testing what his audience is willing to stomach. One of the funniest things I can imagine is a young Yeat fan bumping Team ceo and claiming to the people around them, against all their instincts of good taste, that it "goes hard." So like, what do we make of this. The album has some genuinely outstanding elements and beats that feel years ahead of Yeat's contemporaries. But it also features the same slop of underwhelming performances and writing from Yeat himself that makes it extremely tedious to wade through. At the end of the day though, the onus is on the music itself to make you like it not the other way around. While I did enjoy more of the album than I didn't it was by a pretty slim margin. And even then much of the material I enjoyed was underlined by the fact that seemingly anyone else in rap music could do better with the same materials. 5.5/10