Albums Other People Thought Were Crap: Friday Night at St. Andrews

Well, I haven't actually made an RTJ-related post yet, but I figured this would be the most interesting way to kick things off.  A lot of times you hear people talk about albums as classic or really terrible without ever hearing them go into why.  It can prejudice you against an album (or for an album) unfairly.  I'm going to take a look at some albums where the public opinion is decidedly one way or the other and see if people are being fair or blowing things out of proportion.


Bizarre seemed as good a place to start as any.  Known mostly as the fat guy from D12 who raps about raping his grandmother, Bizzy has, despite having the worst flow of the entire group, THREE full-length albums to his name, this being the latest.  To put that in perspective, Proof only has one.  And Kon Artis?  Well, I'm not even sure which one he is.  And I used to be so into D12 that I owned a D12 chain.


I became interested in Friday Night at St. Andrews when I read the following interview from Bizarre.  Start listening at 2:30.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA8SbH4HTT0


This, by the way, is a spectacular video.  You should really watch the whole thing.  It's just Bizarre awkwardly answering questions in his apartment about Juggalos and producers.  At one point, his phone goes off and they have switch locations for some reason.  Bizzy is a terrible interview.


Anyway, if you were listening you heard Bizarre say that he was going to focus less on his humor for this album and concentrate more on his lyricism.  Because, you know, "people got me misconstrued because of some of my lyrics and didn't consider me a dope MC."  Naturally, I was intrigued to hear what a Bizarre album with a lyrical focus would sound like.  I checked the reviews out first, which are not favorable.  The most useful was this one from Luke Gibson of hiphopdx.com.  Gibson writes

While an emcee like Eminem spits shock value one liners, he also tucks them away inside complex lyrical structures. His one-liners tend to sneak up on you out of nowhere. Bizarre doesn’t have that luxury. The predictability of upcoming lines hampers his appeal. With that said, it’s clear that his creativity has had an apparent influence on Slim Shady. While Bizarre is a grizzled veteran and strange has a market to sell, it has to be done in a convincing manner. Bizarre is unable to do this on Friday Night at St. Andrews, and even though the album is blessed with solid production, it is ultimately a failure.

So that's what I have in my head going into Friday Night at St. Andrews.  Let's see how it plays out.

I didn't really intend to go track by track by this.  But I think I'm going to end up doing that, so let's get something out of the way: Intro tracks are the second most worthless thing on a rap album.  They accomplish nothing because they are, like this one, just two minutes of rappers yelling "Yeaaaaah!  It's the album!  THIS album that I'm recording right now!  Representin' whatever geographical location I'm from and also my relevant label!  Yeeeeeeah!"  It's pointless, especially since they ALSO do those sort of intros at the beginnings of many of their songs.


The first track, "Here We Go (Off Da Chain)", is surprisingly not terrible.  As someone who has listened to approximately 50 Bizarre verses over the course of my life (oh my GOD), I can safely state that this is one of his top three efforts.  Now, that's a relative statement.  Bizarre's top 3 efforts are the equivalent of Jay-Z's bottom 3 efforts (aka any random 3 songs off Kingdom Come).  But still, you can hear what he was talking about in regards to a focus on lyricism.  I by "you can hear," I mean "you will hear when you listen to the song right now."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1qvVqqSVRs


Remember when I said that silly intros are the second most worthless thing on any given rap album?  The MOST worthless thing is skits like "Fat Father", in which Bizarre's friends call him and we are treated to them telling each other jokes.  For a minute and a half.  :(


"Some Days" is the next track.  Bizzy starts with a solid couplet: "Hello, world, my name is Rufus / and most of my life, I've been useless."  I thought he was going to start rapping about how the rap community sees him as a joke and was all prepared to be feelin' him no homo.  But nope, he just starts meanderingly talking generic rap talk: I'm ill, I want money, I also paradoxically GET money, no one appreciates how hot I am, etc.  It's interesting to hear Bizarre run through these cliches because he rarely uses them, instead opting for "I have sex with transvestites and dogs" stuff.  But that doesn't mean it's interesting.  The hook is decent though.


Then we get to the incredibly usesless "Pu$$y".  Another rap convention I hate: meaningless spelling alterations.  There's nothing in this song that alludes to those dollar signs.  Anyway, this song is, of course, about having sex with women, a topic Bizarre is quite familiar rapping about.  It's one of those slow, "let me graphically describe having sex" songs that are always awkward and uncomfortable.  And never more uncomfortable than when Bizzy is rapping about making women "squirt" and eating his woman like a steak.  Ugh.  No-name rapper contribues no-purpose verse.  Yawn.


The laughably-named "Rap's Finest" is next and it's a posse cut.  I love love love posse cuts.  Even bad posse cuts are exciting to me.  There's something about the variety and the in-song competition that's thrilling; you're listening to a verse and then the hook comes and you're like "Holy crap, what's going to happen next?!  It's going to be a DIFFERENT rapper!".  This, of course, is a mediocre-at-best posse cut.  I'd talk about, but it has a MUSIC VIDEO (which is, like all posse cut music videos, 10 times more exciting than the actual song), so I won't bother to say anything except that Royce's verse is probably the best verse on the whole album.  It's not jaw-dropping, but this album kind of sucks, so it wins by default.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCz7y88AI3M


By the way, there are multiple instances of this album being referred to as Live at St. Andrews, some by Bizzy himself.  I have no idea why this happens, but it does.


"School Teacher" is about Bizarre having a crush on his elementary school teacher and farting in class.  I can't imagine you wanting to hear more about this song.  Let's proceed.


"Smoking Crack" is the song we're proceeding to.  In case you're curious, it took Bizarre about 4 songs to lapse back into make-jokes-about-gross-stuff-and-drugs mode.  So much for lyricism and not being a joke MC.  There is nothing about this track that I can recommend to anyone.  Also, Bizarre has sex with Cher in this one.  Sigh.


"Down This Road" features Yelawolf (who?) and we're now officially at the point in a terrible MC's album where you check each song in advance to see if there's a guest verse and pray that it's someone not-terrible.  Yelawolf is pretty boring, but he's not-terrible and that makes his verse better than Bizarre's, which is better than most of his verses on this record but still bad.  Also, in the hook Yelawolf goes "Take a left, motherfUCKA."  Something about how he says it is fun for me.  I'm grasping at straws, folks.


I checked and Tech N9ne is on this next joint, "Believer"!  I'm not really into Tech N9ne at all, but he's a professional, dedicated MC (unlike these no-names and suckrappers), so come on in Tech N9ne!  Stay for a few songs!  Would you like something to drink?  Bizarre's verses (he rhymes "ocean" and "emotion" and it's WORSE THAN IT SOUNDS) blow, but Tech N9ne is a professional, dedicated MC and he lays a decent verse.  Maybe I should check him out sometime.  Maybe Bizarre is skewing my understanding of what a good verse sounds like.


Wait, that song has a video too?  Who's paying for this crap?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f40Rc3qRrs


Things that video taught me: Bizzy's haircut is as bad as I thought, Tech N9ne is weird looking, and children shouldn't be allowed to fake-rob in music videos.


The next track, "Whatcha Smoking On?" ALSO has a video, but this one was clearly produced by Bizarre himself because it sucks.  I mean, all these songs suck.  But the video sucks too.  It's actually a good representation of the quality of the song (because the both suck, got it?), so why not link to that too?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI2-hMi75Zc&feature=related


King Gordy (aka Stupid Rap Name Champion, 2010) comes back to do just as much nothing as he did in "Whatcha Smoking On?" on Wild Like Us".  Bizarre compares himself to Violent J, brags that his "baby dick" was still fertile enough to produce triplets, and threatens to beat up your uncle.  And he rhymes "life" with "life."  It's really a classic.


Most of the reviews of the album talk about one track specifically: "I Love the Babies".  It's not surprising because it's a song about having sex with babies.  Like, there are lines like "Bizarre's about to potty train your daughter" and "There's something about a newborn that turns me ooooon."  So, most of the reviewers talk about how this is in poor taste and evil and not funny.  Blah blah.  All of which is true.  But the real problem is not that the song is about having sex with babies, it's that...wait, no.  The real problem is that the song is about HAVING SEX WITH BABIES.  The fact that it's a badly-rapped song is secondary.


A skit follows.  It's about a Bizarre fan coming up to him and talking to him, which is, in its own way, the funniest joke on the CD.


King Gordy returns (I have no idea what his contributions to these songs is supposed to be, but whatever he's doing, it's better than what Bizarre is doing) on "Rock It Out", a song dedicated to fans of D12.  As a fan of D12 (well, a reformed fan of D12), I am particularly upset at how useless this song is.  It ended without me evening noticing I hadn't heard the last verse.  Bizarre rapping about rap-things instead of about sex with his grandma is even worse because it's so boring.


Sigh.  I can't even find things to say about these songs.  That's how boring they are.  "Warning" does nothing, says nothing, is nothing.  It's like a sonic black hole.  Time stopped while I had it playing.  Then the guest verses came on, and they were mediocre, but at least I wasn't SUSPENDED IN TIME BY BIZARRE'S SUCK.


Whoa.  Bizarre, on "Emotions", made a semi-clever Tears For Fears pun that momentarily woke me out of my suck-rap stupor.  But then he rhymed "poem" with "gone" with "gone" with "song." 


I slept through "Can't Get Enough" and "You Gotta Believe".  I mean, I listened to them and gave them a fair chance and all.  But I'm just so bored.  I have nothing to say because I'm so busy yawning.


So what's the verdict?  Anyone who said this album is crap doesn't know the half of it.  I may be the first human being who has never met Bizarre personally to listen to it all the way through.  And I will surely be the last.


I'm giving this album 1.5 stars because sometimes the production was good, Royce laid down a decent verse, and there was a brief moment at the beginning there were I wasn't sure if the CD would suck.  It did suck though.  A buuuuunch.