Review Summary: This shit isn't easy ain't that damn hard
My favorite season is def winter. Most of my favorite music is thus winter music.
Nobody is winter album as ***, forreal. It even came out in the winter, December 16, the week before Christmas so you know I was hype. I remember vividly to the *** freezing in cars. If I was lucky and with someone wavy enough I’d get to “Hard” and the car would be warm, but I’ll get to that later.
I’m riding forgi’s in the snow doe
Damn it really is a winter movie. Like a Luke Skywalker (Sosa Skywalker) taking down an AT Walker situation (in this movie the Hoth battle happens at the beginning of the movie & the rebels probably win). “Ain’t Just Me” is all about plurality, so naturally there’s multiple Sosa’s greeting you and they stay with you for the whole time. Some songs are named after lyrics, where we get a Paul Walker eulogy (“Fast’n’Furious”), while some appear to be named after the instrumental, like “Fishin”, which sounds like a boat of sosa’s fishing to me.
Yes, there’s lots of Sosa voices, but you wouldn’t be alone in finding this album primarily a catharsis of lonesomeness, probably the most so out of all of in Keef’s works. This has as much to do with the production as it does the vocalist. 12Million aka 12Hunna is a contented figure to Drill fans. His name is attached to classics, but he’s also known for a beef with former partner Young Chop over alleged stolen beats that ended with public opinion in Chop’s favor. Regardless of all that,
Nobody is consistent in it’s off-beat melodies, chilling synths & it’s famously choppy hi-hats. It’s a very singular canvas for So to do a lot of singing, but when he goes off auto-tune it’s equally as compelling, if twice as off-putting. “Gooey” is the first of a trifecta of songs that I think are the best on this album, and it one of the best deliveries of any Chief Keef song I know.
They steady asking why I don't go to the awards/Cause I can't go to the awards with my damn pole or my bros/Cause they gone act a fool/Taking chains niggas act up then/Boom-Boom BANG BANG! Nigga/Money be the color of my veins nigga/Gold the color of my chains nigga. The beat sounds like a computer from space turning off and on again.
“Hard” is one of the few moments in Keef’s discog where he “drops his guard” romantically (along with “No”) or at least does something which in his musical universe can be considered such a thing, and it’s beautiful. Produced with Keef, the beat is quiet and Keef uses the back register of hIs voice like he’s sick [/i]She Don’t Accept Me, But She Speak to my watch[i] is one of my favorite lyrics of all time, not because of the metaphor but because I enjoy imagining someone speak to a watch, especially a thot.
“Nobody” furthers the melancholic tip, featuring him bleating against the guitar sample from “Lost” by Chance the Rapper, (“Brother’s Gonna Work It Out” by Willie Hutch) about when he was broke, a “joke” and how he can buy his grandma anything. The beat is a poem itself, the off-putting percussion giving balance to the sample’s crisp melody. Kanye provides the wordless background pleads behind an array of filters that somehow glues the other discordant pieces together.
That’s all I’m going to describe, because it go crazy and I don’t want to spoil the surprise. In light of Bang 3 and Bang 3 Disc 2 and all of the crisp songwriting that came with it, we should be wise to remember the leaps of experiment that it took to get him here. For winter is coming.
