It finally came out this week. The problem is that probably about five of the tracks were released before the rest of the mixtape, so I’ve more than played those out. And another five tracks involve a vocoder. It appears the first time in the chorus of a song over The Game’s “My Life” beat, and I understood that, since the original song has Li’l Wayne on the hook with a vocoder. But then there are entire songs where verses are put through the auto-tune.
Between T-Pain’s entire career, Li’l Wayne dropping the ball with Tha Carter III, Love Lockdown, and Weezy and Yeezy on Swagger Like Us, I was through with vocoders in songs. That was enough. Then yesterday me and Junior are discussing plans to re-record The Essence with vocoders when I stumble across a link titled new John Legend ft. Kanye West. “Ft. Kanye West” used to be sort of a key phrase for me to instantly download something, along with “ft. Andre 3000” and “Peter North POV”. So I download it and of course, Kanye’s auto-tuned. Now Nickel Nine’s putting his voice through the cursed thing. I feel like the crying Indian at this point.
There are a few lines about Joe Budden. And Joe Budden’s said that he has a few things to say to Royce that he’ll put on wax in the coming weeks. If they beef, even if it’s the non-hateful type ala Kanye/50, I’ll just be happy to see Royce’s aggression focused on something.
After reading a few comments regarding this mixtape, I couldn’t help but notice that more than a few people feel he’s one-dimensional. He only talks about how good he is, that’s basically it. My first reaction was anger and a lot of thoughts starting with “But he…” And I’ll defend him based on other albums, but as far as this mixtape goes, I have to agree that it’s mostly him bragging. But he sure sounds good doing it.