Quick Hits, Vol. 237 (DaBaby, Lil Baby, Lil Keed, Highly Suspect)

DaBaby - Baby on Baby.  DaBaby is the hot new young rapper on the scene right now, and while I've enjoyed some of his cameos on other people's tracks, this whole thing of just him isn't very appealing.  It has an intensity to the flow that kind of stresses me out - its not the Meek Mill thing where he just yells the whole time, but there is a staccato-ness and pace to the syllables that makes this uncomfortable to experience for an extended period of time.  The hit from this album is "Suge," with 275.8 million streams.

Until the beat switches up near the end, the beat for that one is pretty uninteresting.  I don't know man, I'm not feeling the hype here.  Will have the try out his new album sometime soon and see if it sounds any better.

Lil Baby - Drip Harder.  Another of the new young baby rappers.  Because I'm listening to them back to back, it's easy to compare the two of these Baby rappers and see that this one is more dependent on effects (AutoTune) and goes for a laid back vibe. Although Gunna is also on every track,   "Drip Too Hard" is the hit with a whopping 539.2 million streams.

Meh.  And this is why I didn't think any of the rap albums in 2019 were great.  Lyrically not saying much of anything, beat is fine, but not especially catchy.  Don't need it.

Lil Keed - Long Live Mexico.  Another one that I read about somewhere as being the hot new hotness in the rap scene.  Yawwwnnn.  More AutoTune sing/rapping over generic beats.  20 tracks, over an hour, and nothing on here stands out at all.  "HBS" is the most popular right now, with just over 18 million streams.

The only thing that could possibly be redeeming about that track is the ability to chant "hood baby shit" over and over.  Because otherwise it is just one verse, that is freaking stupid, with lines like "Yeah, I got rich but I didn't finish school, Shit, I don't even know what to do, Where the weed man?, Pints of the red, fuck Xans."  Whew.  I'm sure it took at least 20 seconds to come up with those insightful bars.  No thanks.

Highly Suspect - MCID.  I've very much enjoyed these guys in the past and was highly annoyed when they dropped out of ACL a few years ago at the last minute.  They've got that modern rock thing where the tracks can get hard, but also can be clean and slick.  I'd put them in the same bucket as Muse, just without the weird concepts about surveillance and oppression.  And that combo is awesome for "Little One" and "My Name is Human" from prior albums, but it ends up sounding plastic and overproduced on this album.  It's like the opening guitar riff to "Canals" sounds like I am going to enjoy it, but then the lyrics are cheesy and the synths are even worse.  It has the bones of something I would like, but the actual track feels like paint by numbers done poorly by an imitator.

"i don't fuckin' care!"  "gonna live forever!"  "love with all my heart!"  "tearing us apart!" [now kick in the African choir chants!]  "i still love you!"  "someone took a crackpipe and lit it with a torchlight!"  It's just overwrought and weak.  It feels like they listened to much Imagine Dragons and tried to make an arena rock album of apathy.  And then they bring in Young Thug to assist on one where the lead singer of the band throws down a bad rap.  The track with Gojira is super terrible - starts like a death metal sadness song, and then turns into a bad Queens of the Stone Age copy.  This is just a bad album.