really-doe-first-impressions

Rappers conscious of their initial impact to potential fans are already a step ahead. If you’re G.O.O.D. Music affiliate Really Doe, you should have a few football fields worth of advantage. Making his premiere adjacent to megastars Kanye West & Nas, the newly-minted MC helped proclaim to the world “We Major” would be a catchphrase for years to come. Sadly, his debut First Impressions is anything but such declaration.

Really Doe’s biggest detractor is his choppy and bumbling flow. Obviously mimicking Kanye West’s penchant for accenting non-rhyming syllables, the results come in tougher than any leather RUN-DMC ever dealt with. Songs like “RPS” (which stands for “Rock, Paper, Scissors”) and “Checkin’ In” suffer from crummy choruses as evidenced on the latter which croons “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday…” You get the point. Reaches for commercial acceptance don’t fare much better; namely the generic “So Hot” and first single “Mesmerized” with its euro-pop feel and repetitive chant of “forever” on the hook.

Even songs constructed fairly well fall prey to Doe’s whimsical bars. He feeds the faux pas monster on “Million Dolla” (“If it don’t make dollars, it don’t makes sense,) and the hasty melody of “Roll Out” finds the Chicagoan stumbling over his lyrics with blurbs like “Thanks for having me/congrats to my parents/(inaudible)/I repeat like a parrot…” Yikes!

As expected, the lone Kanye West contribution, “Plastic,” adds a bit of spunk into First Impressions, where the apprentice does his best at keeping up with the Wests (a sharp contrast to the rest of the album) as the pair carry on about swiping American Expresses in Italian shopping malls and other assorted nonsense. Similarly, the premise to “Opera Love” is rather banal, but the drowning orchestration makes for one of the more palatable submissions as Doe concentrates his delivery to match the rhythm for a change.

Conclusively, the combo of Really Doe flinging rudy-poo on every track and lack of support from the Kanye Foundation marks this freshman year as a forgetful occurrence. On the bright side, the music industry has proved time and time again there’s always a second chance at making a first impression.

2.5 CIGARETTES

Previously Posted — Really Doe Feat. Danny Klein – “Mesmerized” Video