Review Summary: Haters gonna say, "this shit is wack."
It's amazing to think that a little over six months ago, Nav's presence on Travi$ Scott's undercooked
Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight was something of a saving grace. "beibs in the trap," a thinly veiled Justin Bieber-as-cocaine allusion, provided Scott the sort of interplay that made his better songs- "Oh My Dis Side," "Through the Late Night"- well,
better. Alas, such skills do not appear to be transferable, and the allure of dropping something quickly ahead of a (presumably superior) Metro Boomin collaborative effort proved too much for the Brown Boy. So here we are, six months removed from a single banger, left to contemplate just how much of that song was Scott and how much of it was Nav. If his debut full-length is anything to go by, then even the most conservative of guesses would label his cameo a fluke.
Mercifully,
NAV is short; with few things to say and fewer ways to say it, it's unlikely Nav could carry his laundry list of bad habits past the finish line. Lyrically, he engages with prototypical trap braggadocio: he'll f
uck your girl, he'll snort your blow, then he'll f
uck your girl. He has a pseudonym- The Brown Boy (
yawn)- who, similar to Nav, also likes to f
uck your girl on top of snorting your blow and, uh, f
ucking your girl (
yaawn.) And when he's not doing that, he's inviting The Weeknd onto his tape as the sole guest to express essentially the same sentiment all over again. If you couldn't tell, Nav is boring. He says boring things and he says them in incredibly boring ways. Perhaps that's because he's a bargain bin Lothario, or perhaps its because he waters down Post Malone, who in turn was already a watered down Travi$ Scott, who in turn was already a watered down flavour of the month. Make no mistake, Nav is little other than a smelted down, half-heartedly rendered image of a bad trend, disserviced by bad and difficult to distinguish songs. As a result,
NAV is front-to-back one of the blandest takes on the genre so far. Now
that's an achievement, however dubious.
s
