Review Summary: Earl: The black Aaron Carter
Historians in the future will look at this album as a quintessential example of the metaphorical cancer that spread throughout hip hop and eventually killed it. EARL is not the root of this cancer, but it is one of its many infested cells that contributed to the genre's demise. A genre that was once dominated by wit, political conscience, candidness, and honesty gradually lost all of these ingredients and became entirely about one thing: sound; making the genre virtually indistinguishable from Pop.
Epar is case and point into this phenomenon. The album's focus was obviously 100% devoted to the sound of the album and the message in the lyrics was entirely secondary. There is no point to this album, except to rhyme random word plays (if you call "This bitch is underage But I'll have her face off tied and Nicholas Cage'd" a wordplay) and metaphors over a beat,while trying to keep your attention with violence.
The production on EARL is incredible at some points (the song Couch) and mediocre to boring for the majority of the album. Earl's flow is incredibly orthodox and stale but is impressive to people trying to hear as many rhymes packed into each sentence as possible. Earl keeps the album interesting by name-dropping and making up violent rape stories that are more pathetic than scary. Other than that there literally is nothing except simplistic comparisons about Earl being a random adjective like, hungry, hard or tough. ("The Odd nigga with a spoon in your danimals. As hungry as a cannibal, trapped in a van of cantaloupes".) When looking closer at the rhymes you realize they are quite sloppy and only are held together by Earl mispronouncing word after word in what could be a tribute to Lil' Wayne, the man who did as much as any other to dumb-down the genre and pave the way for mediocre-MC/pop-star rappers like Earl.
At the end of this album you come away with absurd rape stories, a flow that could only be seen as impressive for a 15 year old, and gibberish that sounds like its being randomly read from a rhyming dictionary. The artist's frustration towards women conveyed through denial and hostility is reminiscent of preschoolers saying "girls have cooties". Actually that's being too hard on preschoolers, because cooties are actually scary, made-up rape stories however are more of a I-walked-in-on-you-jerking-off kind of scary. Earl does deserve credit, however, for the song "Luper", for rising from a 15-year-old to a 17-year-old level of poetry. This album truly will go down with other classic child pop albums by pioneers like Aaron Carter. Yet Earl still still has a long way to go to match the cunning wordplay and lyricism displayed in AC's classic song "That's How I Beat Shaq".
