[rayword45]

Day 1007: Lil Pump 2 by Lil Pump

It's a strange feeling when you have little-to-no expectations for something, those expectations are met if not exceeded, and yet you still have a lingering sense of disappointment over the whole thing. I'm not sure the last time this has happened as I know it has happened before, but this album is a phenomenal example of such an occurrence for myself.

Unlike a lot of people, I've never had super strong opinions one way or the other on Pump. His albums and mixtapes have always been wildly inconsistent, his lyrics are a joke and his repetitive delivery is equal parts monotonous and generic, BUT Gucci Gang is a great party track, one that has no pretentiousness to it. It bangs you over the head with its intent and drills its vibe into the newly formed crack into your skull, to the point where I cannot imagine anyone falling in-between loving its infectiousness and loathing the whole stupidity of it all. From my own viewpoint, he has a handful of songs with the same quality of dumb fun, and then a whole bunch of bullshit.

So nobody's really cared about him for the past several years or so, and now he's come back newly sober. His whole persona was Xanax, MDMA and lean so I imagine a bunch of white teen fans ripped up their Harverd Dropout posters in a rage, but I'm glad that he's moving onto healthier lifestyles and I've never subscribed to the idea that you need drugs to reach peak creativity. Taking into account the fact that this dude is nearly 3 years younger than me, and almost a year younger than queen Ice Spice, his newfound cleanliness from substance abuse should be celebrated, not mocked or mourned. Ah well, so goes the culture.

My first exposure to anything from this album was two different friends, on two separate days, showing me the absolutely GLORIOUS Pump Rock x Heavy Metal. When I say this is going to be the song topping everyone's year end charts, I mean that. You HAVE to listen to this song yourself to really understand the magic behind it. This form of gold is achieved once in an artist's lifetime, and the mine has been struck, demolished and paved over for new gentrified developments.

Even with that though, I was fully expecting this album to be in line with past efforts. And you know what? I was 100% correct, this is no better and no worse than the vast majority of his prior output. It's just as mindless, just as monotonous, just as unabashedly idiotic. Claims that this album is uniquely bad amongst his output are even more ridiculous than claims that it's uniquely strong, what the fuck is the differentiator?

Ultimately, this is everything I was expecting, but part of me was really hoping for a whole album of "metal" songs. I knew it wouldn't happen, but a boy can dream, can't she? At the very least, the album is solid proof you don't need drugs to make music, because if you asked a group of people to pick which of his albums were made while sober, I don't think you'd get a lot of correct guesses. There's really nothing about this album that differentiates it from his output made while fried off a cocktail of illicit drugs, which is... Good? Bad? Whatever it is, it's extremely consistent I guess.

Seriously though, he's younger than Ice Spice?

Best Track: you know it
Rating: 3.5/10