Review Summary: Ambition is a term not applicable here at all.
I like to listen to music with my eyes closed. I’ve done this for years. Whether I lay down or just sit up in a chair, I like to rest my head back and let the sounds draw the pictures in my head, rather than create them myself. Music, although auditory, is as visual for me as looking at a Carravaggio painting would be. I envision the sounds, I see the lyrics, I can watch the music and listen to it at the same time. The best bands and artists I listen to are the ones that I can close my eyes and watch a film to. Something that conjures images resonating within me and accompanies them to what it is I’m listening to. Music is meant to strike something within, to sound like the song was written for you even though you know it wasn’t. To excavate something you didn’t even know you were feeling, and make you feel it. Sadly, everything I just described is the exact opposite of “Animal Ambition”, the latest album from rapper 50 Cent. I can’t imagine who would be moved by songs like these, but nonetheless, there must be someone out there in the over 8 billion people existing right now. I didn’t mean to offend you.
When people pick at modern rap music, they tend to explain their argument by saying one thing. “It’s all about the same thing. Money, hoes, and drugs.” A lot of people would argue you just have to know where to look to find rap music that doesn’t employ these themes specifically, but certainly 50 Cent is not helping anyone’s case. From his major label debut, “Get Rich Or Die Trying”, there hasn’t been an album he delved off into the abstract and rapped about the environmental dangers of fracking or the history of the stamp. It’s consistently about those three things exactly. I didn’t expect to listen to “Animal Ambition” and hear politically conscious rap, nor should you. 50 Cent is a rapper whose almost as mathematically divisible as the vitamin water he owns a share in. 90% image, 10% music. One look at the first two albums, you see him shirtless, flexing as if he’s posturing to hang you from a balcony window. 50 Cent has always been all image, and this will surely never change.
Musically, “Animal Ambition” is about as mish-mash as can be. It’s almost as if he and his producers couldn’t decide whether they wanted to sound stripped down and basic or clunky and excessive. You have the opening track, “Hold On”, which is extremely basic and subdued, and the title track, “Animal Ambition”, which has this clunky synth bass rumbling through it as 50 growls and tries to make us believe he’s an animal. Production wise, the tracks are very uneven, with the most pristine and “wiped down” sounding being “Pilot”, which is one the only track that actually works altogether, lyrically and instrumentally. It’s not that this album is lo-fi or underproduced. It’s there’s an odd disenfranchisement from one track to the next instrumentally, with each sounding so wildly separate from the last, that leaves the album feeling just plain disjointed. The projection of what they were going for on each track is what leaves me scratching my head the most. “Irregular Heartbeat” is a solemn and almost morose sounding track that exemplifies what gangster rap used to be about, and it’s immediately followed by a radio friendly cheery track, “Twisted”, that feels incredibly out of place. 50 Cent is trying to appease too many people at once, with his thug friendly gangster tunes, and his radio friendly gangster tunes. This is certainly not a new problem in rap music. This problem has plagued the genre for as long as it’s been in existence, and still will as long as major labels and artists want to make money and sell records. Which I’m guessing they do.
Lyrically, the album is subpar if not atrocious from start to finish. With countless references to murder, sex, drugs, and other magical gangster tales, there’s absolutely zero substance to the lyricism, but then again 50 Cent is not known as a deep lyricist whatsoever. His major hits have always been mind numbingly unoriginal, with each helping to project the image of truly fearsome gangster to whoever is willing to believe it. It’s almost like Santa Claus. There are some kids out there who do believe their favorite rappers are these Al Capone like figures, with a bevy of exotically beautiful women pleasuring them as they wish in between breaks counting their never ending stream of money. But for anyone with half a brain, we know the image is as real as Santa Claus himself. Every single track on “Animal Ambition” talks about the same thing. There’s not an ounce of variation. 50 Cent is a ruthless gangster who has sex with every women he wants and is as wealthy as ever off both rapping and a well run drug business. I feel like if you replaced the word crack with meth, the cast of Breaking Bad could have used this for inspiration, and if not that, toilet paper in their trailers. 50 Cent is not exactly young enough to still be claiming to be a drug kingpin/murderer either, where everyone who looks at his Twitter knows the exact opposite is true. I wouldn’t be surprised if a board room full of 60 year old white men told him what to write about. “Kids love drug dealers, kiddo. You’re gonna make a bunch off these numbskulls!” Also, as if the blatantly unoriginal lyricism wasn’t enough, the attempts at reaching out to the youth by making references to Instagram and adding the sound effect of an iPhone text message into the songs is as laughable as the outrageous stories themselves. In the next few years, these now culturally “hip” references will be down the same road as Diners Club cards and 4 way calling on a landline. Incredibly passé and even sadder with age.
One of the main reasons I decided to review and listen to this album was the amount of praise from rap fans it seems to be getting. I can’t even begin to explain how many times I’ve heard someone say this album is “fire”, and how incredible it is. I think this really comes down to one thing. The quality of rap music released today is on an ever steady decline, and fans of the music will latch onto whatever it is that seems to be the least offensive and terrible. “Animal Ambition” was not totally unenjoyable. Certain parts of tracks have 30 seconds or less of something good, and that’s just a silver lining to an otherwise enormous black cloud. Certain parts I enjoyed, namely 50 Cent getting slayed on his own track, “Everytime I Come Around”, by a relatively unknown New Orleans rapper named Kidd Kidd. Mr. Kidd destroys his verse, and it was the only part of the album I didn’t feel the urge to fast forward or skip altogether. It’s a nightmare if your own album in its entirety is overshadowed by one persons guest spot on your track. When I put my head back to listen to this album, I saw no films, no images, nothing like that. I felt nothing because this album is not meant to make you feel anything. It’s meant to further the gains of the parties involved, to fatten the wallets of the people who made it . Cash rules everything around us, and if that means weaving amazing fantasies, so be it I guess. Business is business, and that’s all this is and will ever be.
