6.8/10
Favorite Track: "Silent Ride" Least Favorite Track: "No Warning (Feat. Shae Universe)"
Compton rapper Boogie is the latest addition and signing to Eminem’s Shady Records. Whether that’s the reason or not, his new 2019 project ; Everythings For Sale has so far been better received than most everything he has put out thus far. Everything’s For Sale tends to feature a much more level headed Boogie with an approach with a more varied subject matter in most of his tracks, some obvious added RnB elements, and far more focused instrumentals. One of my biggest complaints with Boogie’s music up until this point had to do with his repetitive and repeated subject matter which made his music rather limited. This combined with a clear lack of hooks made most of Boogie’s verses drag on and start to seem like he was just finding different ways to convey to his audience how poor and sad he was. Luckily, this seems to completely fade away on Everythings For Sale. He even addresses this complaint in the very first sixty seconds of the album. “They like we tired of hearing you poor, at yo heart about how you in a struggle and how you at war”. The rest of the intro track ; “Tired/Reflections” is padded out with a pleasant piano background instrumental that has the energy of something you would listen to while staring out of your window on a rainy day. I really like the idea that he spits in the chorus that “he’s at war with his reflection”. I think it’s a really clever and unique idea for a track and Boogie performs the idea very well. A few tracks later we get “Soho (feat. JID)”, which while enjoyable is extremely short lived. The verses we get from both JID and Boogie are so lively and overall work great but they both are simply too short. A collab from two artists like this could of been so great, but Soho just turns out to be a missed opportunity. The track also fades into this beat switch with Boogie rapping over the new beat in almost a melodic spoken word kind of passage. It’s one of a few creative directions that Boogie takes on this project that don’t exactly make sense to me or work out. This and a few other decisions made on Everythings For Sale just come off as confusing. Another track that just slightly misses the mark is the Eminem feature “Rainy Days”. Boogie spits an extremely catchy refrain that almost sounds Kodak esc and it pretty much makes the track. However, like most of what Eminem has put out as of late, in this feature he sounds like a forty year, old pissed off, white guy (he is). This track features another creative direction that really doesn’t work out in the end of Eminem’s verse. His verse in “Rainy Days” is on its own pretty clunky. It’s tempo doesn’t really work and it’s overall just not well performed. However at the end of his verse Eminem comes in with the same staccato character flow that he has been using for his past two years of unsuccessful music but he decides that it would be a good idea to not only spit this annoying flow but to pepper the down beats with him essentially echoing the last word of whatever the previous phrase he said was. So for the last thirty seconds of his verse it’s literally just him talking over a beat with no down beats or pauses and eventually, he just lyrically gives up and starts making random fucking noises. What I’m trying to say of course is that Eminem is basically BlueFace. The last track I really wanted to touch on was “Whose Fault” (feat. Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah). My favorite part of this cut comes from Boogie’s surprisingly passionate and emotional delivery. The track features nods to previous relationships, cheating, and his own kids and is actually done so in a very tasteful way. The emotional delivery almost sounds like something we would get from one of Boogies very close collaborators ; Eminem. Everythings For Sale is quite honestly a mix bag compared to Boogies previous work. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing however, because versatility has always been something Boogie has lacked as a musician but with this versatility comes new creative directions and concepts, and as to be expected not all of them pan out, however enough of them do pan out to make Everythings For Sale a worthwhile listen.