Kelly’s Worst Cover

Machine Gun Kelly, the Cleveland-born, genre-bending artist, has appeared in two new songs over the course of January. On the first song, “Thought it Was,” Kelly worked with long-time collaborator Travis Barker of Blink-182 and a new partner, Iann Dior. Unsurprisingly, the song followed a typical emo-trap formula with loads of autotune crooning from Iann Dior and a soft acoustic guitar serving as the backbone of the instrumental. Machine Gun Kelly’s contribution to the song, however, is somehow even more lacking in substance than Dior’s. Kelly’s songwriting is just as horrible on this track as it has ever been. His lyrics are all painfully bland, cliché, emo tropes. Also, the influence of Travis Barker on the song is practically impossible to notice. The second released track featured Kelly in a solo setting, doing a cover of Frank Ocean’s “Swim Good.” With this song, it seemed that Kelly was attempting to double down on his gloomy, depressive aesthetic. The problem arose, however, when Frank Ocean himself already captured that aesthetic in a way that is a hundred times more touching, more convincing, and just flat out more passionate. Since this is a cover of Frank Ocean, Kelly is able to bypass any criticism of his terrible songwriting abilities. However, along with being a worse songwriter than Ocean, Kelly is also a worse vocalist. It seemed he was trying to appear cold and detached with his vocal style, but instead, it sounded remarkably one-note and devoid of emotion. This is before you even compare it to the original Frank Ocean performance. This song seemed doomed from the start, showing that if Kelly is interested in covers, maybe he should just stick to Paramore. 

Griselda Goes Big

Last Friday, Griselda’s own Benny the Butcher released a single from his upcoming album “Tana Talk 4” with a feature from perhaps the biggest star that the label has ever obtained. “Johnny P’s Caddy” featured J.Cole, merging the worlds of mainstream backpack rap with the underground boom-bap revival that has been brewing recently thanks to artists like Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, Boldly James, and, of course, Benny. The Butcher started the song off with another very solid verse to add to his consistent streak. If you are familiar with any of Benny’s music, you know that he always spits his lines with a laid-back but still incredibly punchy flow. His bars hit immediately and show off his skills for putting words together in a stimulating way that always paints a picture. “My ability to turn words to imagery is probably the reason they’re gonna remember me,” Benny said. After the alley-oop from Benny, J-Cole entered the track to complete the slam dunk. On this feature, there is an overwhelming feeling that Cole is excited to be present in the song. It sounds as though he himself knows how much exposure his name will bring to the massively slept-on Griselda label. The subject matter of his verse consists of reasoning as to why Cole believes himself to be the greatest rapper alive; however, he covers this fairly typical topic in a way that is very clever and smooth. He begins with “on the night I was born, the rain was pouring, God was cryin’, lightning struck power outage, sparks was flyin’.” He painted himself as a sort of supernatural gift; this way of writing is so much more interesting than just typical rapper “I’m the best” mumbo-jumbo. It seemed on this track both artists were trying to pack as much punch as they could into every single line. It is not often that such a clash of styles is pulled off as seamlessly as it is on this record. Match made in heaven if you ask me.

Major Album Announcements

Twenty twenty-two is being built up as a year stuffed with anticipated album releases. Around one week ago, Indie star Rex Orange County announced his new album entitled “Who Cares?” The record is set to release on March 11th, over two years since his last project. In the very same week as this announcement, prolific Chicago mogul Kanye West took to Instagram to proclaim that the sequel to last year’s “Donda” would be coming out much sooner than we originally thought. Very little information about the project was revealed. He claimed that it would release on February 22nd; however, Kanye’s track record when it comes to releasing music when he says he will is notoriously inconsistent. The other bit of info we got was that the album will be executive produced by Atlanta rapper Future. I have seen many people over-inflate the importance of this. Executive produced could mean anything, and it’s not likely that Future had any creative input on Kanye’s final product. Nevertheless, the upcoming months continue to give us reasons to be excited.

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