female impersonator
nothin' but the frog in me
gonna go watch a movie but when i get back im gonna write something up about how genuinely interesting it is to me to watch the competitive scene on smogon react to a new pokemon gen
like 5 albums i havent listened to before so im gonna do a few music posts (probably spaced out over the next couple days) but the first one i wanna talk about is Busta Rhymes' 1997 album When Disaster Strikes. its good! i haven't actually listened to a busta rhymes album in its entirety before despite being a fan of what i've heard from him (which is a lot all things considered; i'm a huge tribe called quest fan and he's landed on some really good songs from other artists i like too), so this is my first time getting really deep into his own work. it was a good introduction! it's definitely one of those albums where there's a stretch of songs in the middle (in this case, from the title track to Turn It Up, which includes my favorite track, So Hardcore) that i like better than anything else on the album, but i'm not sure if that's because those are genuinely the best tracks, if everything else is just a bit more dated, or if i just have weird tastes. either way, i think the album's main flaw is that it just did not need to be that long - there were enough decent-but-not-great tracks that could have been left out imo that the album's runtime could have been maybe 50 or so minutes, rather than 65. not that it bothered me either way: i spent the whole day sitting outside as the weather went from too cold to too hot to too cold, and it was nice to have a little distraction.
i guess all the above is just kind of "what mood jane was in today", so lemme try and summarize the actual album: an incredibly talented vocalist making an album that has some genuinely unexpected (while still characteristic) stylistic detours and choices, but one that still feels very 1990s - particularly in that weird transition period around the end of the century (and the beginning of this one) that marked a lot of big changes in hip-hop.
first of all, im gonna start listening to albums a couple times at least before i post these kinds of things (not calling them reviews 'cause i don't think they're comprehensive enough), 'cause Man do i have way more thoughts now.
i don't disagree with a lot of what i said above, i just have more to say, really. i didn't really talk about what he was doing that made some tracks good and some forgettable, so i'm gonna try and lay that out here. i definitely appreciated that Busta tried to not just stick with the same flows he had rolled out on tracks like scenario, and it seems to have served him pretty well on, for example, Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See, but i feel like his more controlled-sounding, calmer flows hadn't been refined quite as well as they are as he's grown older (see, for example, his feature on Anderson .Paak's Bubblin from a few years ago).
i think the instrumentals on this album are really hit-or-miss, serving him really well on tracks like Rhymes Galore, while tracks like Get Off My Block and We Could Take It Outside have beats that just leave the whole track completely unforgettable, although this might be more a factor of the album's age than anything.
the features on this album are pretty spotty as well - Erykah Badu, of course, can do no wrong as a featured artist (even if i felt like the track itself was kind of shallow in its messaging while being too preachy to ignore that aspect), and Puff and Mase fit pretty well into the slots they were given, but aside from that i think Busta could have carried tracks like Get Off My Block a lot better on his own - with that example in particular, i think the guest verse may well have dragged it down to being my least favorite track, along with the instrumental and the chorus which i just found kind of annoying.
still, Busta Rhymes is a talented enough vocalist that he pulls it all together into a project that's ultimately pretty enjoyable in my view, and definitely validates his presence as a solo artist (although i haven't yet listened to his solo debut, so that thought might turn out to be a little redundant.)
like 5 albums i havent listened to before so im gonna do a few music posts (probably spaced out over the next couple days) but the first one i wanna talk about is Busta Rhymes' 1997 album When Disaster Strikes. its good! i haven't actually listened to a busta rhymes album in its entirety before despite being a fan of what i've heard from him (which is a lot all things considered; i'm a huge tribe called quest fan and he's landed on some really good songs from other artists i like too), so this is my first time getting really deep into his own work. it was a good introduction! it's definitely one of those albums where there's a stretch of songs in the middle (in this case, from the title track to Turn It Up, which includes my favorite track, So Hardcore) that i like better than anything else on the album, but i'm not sure if that's because those are genuinely the best tracks, if everything else is just a bit more dated, or if i just have weird tastes. either way, i think the album's main flaw is that it just did not need to be that long - there were enough decent-but-not-great tracks that could have been left out imo that the album's runtime could have been maybe 50 or so minutes, rather than 65. not that it bothered me either way: i spent the whole day sitting outside as the weather went from too cold to too hot to too cold, and it was nice to have a little distraction.
i guess all the above is just kind of "what mood jane was in today", so lemme try and summarize the actual album: an incredibly talented vocalist making an album that has some genuinely unexpected (while still characteristic) stylistic detours and choices, but one that still feels very 1990s - particularly in that weird transition period around the end of the century (and the beginning of this one) that marked a lot of big changes in hip-hop.