Top 25 Albums of 2018 #25
Sheck Wes - Mudboy
Release Date: October 5th, 2018
Genre: Trap Rap
For fans of: Lil Uzi Vert, Waka Flocka Flame, darties that turn into narties
I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for party songs. They get me every single time. Even though it was only a few years ago, I look back with nostalgia on crushing Busch Lights in college apartments while screaming along to ‘Trap Queen’ and ‘Jordan Belfort’ among others. I thought that I was the perfect age at the exact perfect time in party music history, and felt bad for those older or younger than I. I had no idea how wrong I was, until earlier this year as I looked upon instagram with crippling FOMO as clips of kids losing their minds to certified banger ‘Mo Bamba’ filled my feed for days on end. Sheck Wes actually released the debut single off Mudboy over a year before dropping the project and it achieving sleeper success as the soundtrack to darties, tailgates and the ultimate measure of popularity in 2018: memes. Frankly, at first I didn’t feel completely comfortable listening to it. I was never in the the right environment, and what’s worse is that it made me feel old. It wasn’t until listening to Wes’s debut in full that I understood him and his unique approach to trap rap enough to really appreciate it.
There could not be a more accurate title for this record than Mudboy. The production and rapping is just that: muddy, dirty, dark stuff that sucks you into a trance, but Sheck has no intention of keeping you there for long, as his jarring and sometimes genuinely funny placement of adlibs jolt you awake. Whether it’s yelling “BITCH” simply because, as he’s stated in interviews, he really likes that word, or crooning “Mudboooooy” in a a pitch so high that he has to be self-aware of how ridiculous it sounds, he wants to keep reminding you that this is supposed to be a fun album.
Or is it? If so, Sheck isn’t doing a very convincing job. From a lyrical standpoint, he rarely sounds like he’s having a good time. On the more upbeat tracks other than ‘Mo Bamba’ such as ‘Gmail’ and ‘Kyrie’ he sounds like your friend at the pregame halfheartedly trying to convince everyone to go to the club, but really doesn’t care either way (a feeling I know all too well) and spends most of the record angry at someone or something, and in some cases EVERYTHING like in the aptly titled ‘**** Everybody’. Sheck Wes is troubled, and that doesn’t come out any clearer than on two of the highlights on Mudboy, ‘Never Lost’ and ‘Jiggy on the ****s’. The former of which references and introduces us to the true story of Sheck Wes’s mother sending him to Senegal at age 17 without his cell phone or passport to punish him for his “bad habits”, and the latter focusing on it as its central theme. On these songs, we got some insight on why the rapper is so mad at and disinterested with the world. Sheck is far from a strong lyricist and other than a handful of references to NBA players, he mostly keeps things surface level. On ‘Jiggy’ he raps: “I’ve been roamin’ these streets / I been roamin’ them alone / In my eyes I see their ****ed up world / In they eyes they see a palace and a home / My mama said that I ain’t never coming home”. Ouch. Now there’s a real gut-punch that doesn’t need any fancy imagery to accompany it. He’s alone, he can’t relate to the people around him and he feels hopeless. And yet, just when we start to think we’ve got him all figured out, he follows this moment with the final two tracks reminding of us how weird and goofy he is by rapping about Danimals (yes, that yogurt with the monkey on it, I know you guys remember it) and his favorite designer socks, respectively.
For someone who’s brain seems to be all over the place, I find it surprising that the major flaw of this record is how one-note it is from a sonic perspective. Like I said above, I like the harsh production and think it brings something different to mainstream trap. However, it never changes over the course of the entire album, and that coupled with Sheck’s bored and distracted flow for the majority of the 50 minute run time has me losing interest and either skipping songs or not making it to the end on virtually every listen. It all sounds so samey. While I did enjoy delving into the reasoning behind why it sounds like Sheck doesn’t even want to be in the booth recording, it doesn’t necessarily translate into engaging content. While I respect Sheck for his uniqueness and vulnerability, something being relatable does not necessarily equate to it being enjoyable, and Mudboy ends up rounding out as more of a novelty experience than a mainstay in my collection.
I look forward to future releases from Sheck Wes, hopefully with some improvement to his technical rapping skills. If you’re a fan of ‘Mo Bamba’, I do suggest checking out the full record, but don’t look for any of the other tracks to be your new song for doing keg stands to. In fact you just might kill the vibe entirely by making everyone at the function question why they’re even there in the first place.
Overall Score: 7.4/10
Highlights: Gmail, Jiggy on the ****s