4/10
Favorite Track: "Same Thing" Least Favorite Track: "How"
In the third rendition of the chorus on “Forever” off of Lil Baby’s new studio album, My Turn, he and Lil Wayne sing about how they refuse to sell out to labels and executives within the hip hop industry. Throughout the first few lines of this chorus they attempt immaculate vocal harmonization, but rather than their voices blending together it seems as if Lil Baby’s is gone completely. This isn’t a mixing issue, the case is just that Wayne’s voice is bouncing up and down with expressive cracks and in contrast Lil Baby sounds flat and indistinguishable. His voice maintains the same monotone, lifeless expression throughout. This isn’t only the case with this track however, this is my issue with the majority of the twenty tracks presented on Lil Baby’s My Turn. This again becomes painfully apparent on “No Sucker”, featuring Baby’s frequent collaborator Moneybagg Yo. Not to say that Moneybagg has a superbly recognizable or expressive voice, but even sounding human while trading verses with Lil Baby is enough to sound more interesting. The repetitiveness is even further assisted by the lack of interesting production on My Turn, (site “How”, and its excuse for a “beat”). This might be a product of the sheer amount of different producers present, but somehow barely any of them manage to bring anything tasty to the potluck. Nonetheless, Tay Keith’s acoustic driven banger on “Same Thing”, rises above the pack. On the track Baby rants about how he goes “Plain Jane”, because the public associates expensive jewelry with thugs. Unfortunately I think Baby’s reputation as a “thug” is irerasable, (a young thug), because that's pretty much all he sounds like throughout this album’s hour long runtime, and if anything is Plain Jane it’s his vocals and delivery. I think jewelery is the last thing he has to be worried about. “We Should”, featuring Thugger himself isn’t even interesting because we practically get the same verse twice. The case isn't that this album is too offensive or awfully put together that it’s unlistenable, but rather that everything on here is so uninspired and bland that listening to all twenty tracks is more a chore than it is pleasurable.