Thotianas and gentlemen, welcome... to the meat show.
And by meat show of course I mean worst rappers in the game, and by thotianas I mean wonderful
respectful women.
And today we will be looking at the one and only Blueface baby, yeah aight.
Should I do this entire video with my audio being out of sync with the video, or is that
a bit too much?
So Blueface is.. a rapper, I think he’s also like a crip or something, I don’t know
he doesn’t really talk about it that much, and to get an idea of his music I listened
to his Famous Cryp mixtape, his Two Coccy mixtape, the We Over Famous project he did
with a rapper called Trendd and numerous SoundCloud singles.
So, is Blueface one of the worst rappers in the game?
Well, this is CDTV, would appreciate you following me on twitter because we are so, so close
to 10k on there, and let’s answer that question.
Part 1: Voice
Well for a couple of these segments, I’m gonna have to give Blueface points for standing
out and originality to some degree.
You may have heard Blueface’s voice being compared to Courage the Cowardly Dog and yeah,
that’s not an innacurate comparison at all, it’s pretty spot on.
Now try not to focus on his flow in these clips, don’t worry we’ll get to that,
but right now we’re talking purely about his voice.
His courage the cowardly dog having voice.
And yeah, that absolutely is as ridiculous as it sounds.
And this ridiculousness works in his favour.
His voice is so unpredictable and erratic that it’s kind of captivating.
Sometimes he kinda sounds like his parents walked in on him viewing questionable content
on his laptop, and he’s just scrambling to close his laptop as fast as he can, desperately
trying to explain what he was doing causing the pitch of his voice to rapidly shift and
crack.
That’s what he sounds like.
Honestly, I’d much rather listen to a rapper with vocals like this than someone who’s
just monotone rambling, even if it is very hard to take him seriously.
It’s not that big of an issue, because if you try and take Blueface super seriously,
you’re kinda missing out on the entire appeal of his music.
That’s not to say he doesn’t have some vocally boring songs though, because he definitely
does have some.
You see, Blueface is pretty lucky in that, at least to me, he has a voice that’s naturally
got some character to it, but even that can’t save him on a few tracks where he just sounds
so uninterested in rapping.
On these songs, he loses a decent chunk of what makes his voice stand out in the first
place, and it makes for his weakest tracks.
Luckily there aren’t too many songs like this, and his delivery is improving pretty
quickly.
On his most recent songs like “Dm” and especially on “Bleed It”, he’s added
more raspiness and aggression to the way he raps, and that further adds to how attention
grabbing his vocals can be.
We also get to see him trying out a melodic style on Studio, and it unsurprisingly results
in one of the most commercial and catchiest hooks he’s made, I’d be open to hearing
more stuff like that.
Overall, it’s kind of hard to hate on Blueface’s voice, with the only real issues being that
if you’re tryna take him seriously, you’re not gonna have a good time, and that he’s
made his voice appear so interesting that if he releases a track that’s a bit more
monotone, it instantly comes off as much more boring.
Other than that, his voice has a recognisable sound to it, he uses it in a pretty unique
way, and if he keeps being aggressive like on “Bleed It”, he’s only gonna keep
improving.
I’m gonna give Blueface a 6/10 here, there’s still some decent room for improvement but
he knows exactly what he’s doing with his over the top delivery and taking that into
consideration, it’s hard for me not to love it.
Part 2: Flow
Where do I even start with this one?
I guess you could say Blueface and the beat have a.. pretty weird relationship.
If by some chance you couldn’t pick it up in the other clips I played, lemme show you
another one.
You may have noticed something there.
The beat?
Well the beat is like, over here... and Blueface is about this far away from it.
Or maybe the beats far away from him, who knows how this man works his magic with this
weird, offbeat flow.
One of the strangest things to me is how Blueface can still make his songs catchy and memorable
whilst his flow is offbeat.
And I say that because if I think about the most memorable parts of the majority of songs,
it’s always those parts that fit on to the beat and work with it incredibly well, for
example when certain rhymes line up perfectly with the kicks or the snare drums on a track.
These parts stand out because of the synchronization, and hence are easier to remember.
But Blueface?
Blueface is fighting against the beat, and yet he still has some hooks that will play
through your head all day.
He does hit a few of the right beats, then intentionally misses a lot of the right beats,
and maybe that unnatural style is what makes his songs stick with you, despite the fact
that there’s a very loose structure to them.
Its almost like an even more free form version of E-40’s flow.
There’s still some kind of rhythm there that makes this flow work to a degree, and
he’s so confident in being offbeat that it does work somewhat.
The thing is though, how long can this really last for?
The reason I’m saying that is because it comes off as such a novelty act, something
you listen to, laugh at, kind of start to vibe with a little bit, and then realise that
no matter what, rapping to the pattern of the beat will always sound infinitely better.
And it gets even more annoying when I think about how much more I enjoy his songs which
stick more to the confines of the instrumental.
Bleed It, Slidin and Bonco aren’t fully matched to the beat, but they’re pretty
close and it makes those songs way easier to listen to repeatedly.
I hope we see more stuff like that from Blueface going forward, because the offbeat stuff was
great for helping him blow up, but for me it’s something that doesn’t have real
staying power.
I’m gonna give Blueface a 5/10 for his flow.
I’ve got to give him points for being different to every other rapper I’ve covered in this
series so far with his flow, the way he somehow makes it work a bit and his self awareness
shows that he’s deliberately rapping off beat and it’s not just a case of incompetent
rapping, but the appeal of this flow is wearing off quickly and his on beat songs are actually
pretty solid.
Hopefully there’s more of that moving forward.
Part 3: Lyrics
Can I even speak on the lyrics of such a godly rapper?
It’s a tough task, and sometimes we have to look at these lyrical masterminds critically,
so let’s do just that.
One of my favourite things about Blueface’s lyrics is his funny one liners, a lot of them
are actually put together pretty nicely, such as the legendary “mop the floor, hide the
wet sign just to catch him slipping”.
But that’s not all.
We also have “I’m like a stripper with this pole, it don’t take much to get it
poppin”, “eat the ***** like some frosted flakes, I love a tiger body the ***** be great”,
“her *** look like 2 midgets in a sleeping bag”, “dozing off in this Benz cause I
can afford not to focus”, “wok got me poured, but this TEC got him leaning”, “but
I ain’t trippin, these balenciagas ain’t got no laces”.
He also has some wordplay that lasts over a couple lines that’s pretty cool such as
“Treat my b**** like a pistol, no such thing as keepers, These b****** throwaways, bust
once, then I throw away”.
It’s pretty refreshing to see a rapper incorporate wordplay in such a playful way in this series
to the point where it doesn’t even have to be that amazing, because it’s just so
entertaining when combined with his delivery and flow.
However, i know it’s hard to believe, but sometimes Blueface actually has flaws in his
immaculate lyrics.
He hid the wet sign so far back, that occasionally he catches himself slipping.
You see, it starts to get a little less entertaining when these lines get recycled entirely or
reformatted into a very slightly different bar.
He does that with almost all of the ones I mentioned previously, and more, and this shows
that there is a limitation to Blueface’s wordplay at the moment.
Like I said, the lines did have me smiling, but the second time I heard them in a different
song it made the recycled bar and the original bar lose a decent bit of their impact.
And if I’m being honest, there’s not really all that much to his subject matter and every
song is essentially about the same thing.
Girls and guns, that sums it up nicely.
Overall I think I’ll have to give Blueface’s lyrics a 5/10.
Like I said, it’s refreshing to cover someone in this series who has a good sense of wordplay
and puts a lot of it in his songs AND on top of that is pretty funny, but the fact that
he’s recycled so many bars already is a bit worrying.
There’s also the fact that, while his lyrics are entertaining for the most part, they’re
not really about anything, and for me that does pull down his score a fair bit.
Still though, not that bad at all.
Part 4: Beats
Now surprise surprise, the beats are actually the worst part of Blueface’s music for me...
hold up that’s not even sarcastic, that actually is a surprise for once.
His voice is weird but captivating, same thing with his flow, and his lyrics are always fun,
but his beat selections are actually kinda hard to distinguish from each other for the
most part.
There’s nothing wrong with having consistent production choices, but it becomes an issue
when you almost pick the exact same beat over and over and over again.
The formula is simple; usually high note pianos with a little bit of a horrorcore vibe, and
that’s the main melody of 80% of his songs, maybe with a eerie synth line thrown over
a few of them.
I’m not even joking, that one sound is so prominent in his music.
Famous Cryp, Next Big Thing, Choose A Player, Dead Locs, F***** Em, Bonco, these beats might
as well be the same one.
I have a feeling these are just the beats he feels most comfortable over because even
his first songs sound like this, you just need to hear No Hook for proof of that, but
he really needs to step outside his comfort zone otherwise every track is gonna sound
like a slightly altered re-run.
I’m not saying these beats are bad necessarily, it’s purely that I’m tired of hearing
him over these beats despite him not even having much music out right now.
That was my biggest issue with his Famous Cryp album, the production couldn’t be more
one note throughout it and that does take away from the amusing feeling that every other
aspect of Blueface’s material gives off.
It makes songs like Bleed It and Studio stand out much more, because they don’t have that
formula.
And I really like the beats on both of those songs, with Studio having a more smooth tone
and the bass synth hits on Bleed It giving that track a nice bounce to it.
And honestly even then, he’s used at least a couple beats that sound like Bleed It before,
but not to the point of it being too much yet.
Overall, there’s not really any production that I think sounds overwhelmingly bad, at
its worst he just has a few beats that sound quite cheap, but other than that there’s
no glaring issues with the actual sounds.
My main problem is that repetitiveness and his seeming reluctance to change his sound
all that much.
For that reason, I’m gonna give Blueface’s beat selection a 4/10.
That score could definitely be increased if he didn’t have full album that basically
sounded like one beat the whole way through, but hopefully we’ll see him experiment more
in the future.
Part 5: Enjoyment
If there is one thing i can really say for Blueface, it’s that I have never really
covered anyone like this in this series before.
Again, points for a different style have to be given.
Everything about his style is just ridiculous, and that’s exactly what has made him so
popular.
You can’t not notice him, whether you’re laughing at him or with him.
I definitely think that if you try to take him seriously, you’re gonna have a
very hard time enjoying his music, he even talks at the end of Dead Locs about how people
are eating up his offbeat rapping.
The main problems for me so far in terms of enjoyment are a) this style does lose its
impact quickly the more you get subjected to it, and then it just comes off as a guy
deliberately rapping poorly which kind of kills his replay value and b) somehow even
with this uniqueness he’s managed to become a bit repetitive due to his beat choices and
subject matter.
Overall though, this experience was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be after seeing
all the memes surrounding Blueface’s strange rapping.
He’s got good foundations, his voice is pretty nice and there’s something really
likeable about him, but I honestly just want a full, on beat project from him.
Maybe that would kill his buzz, maybe other people don’t wanna hear that, but I personally
would love it, I think he could really kill something like that.
So overall, I’ll give Blueface a 5/10 for enjoyment.
Something that is fun in the moment, but nothing that I’m gonna be scrambling to re-listen
to anytime soon.
Part 6: Verdict
So, as a whole, Mr Face scores a 25/50 here, which places him at the number 11 spot on
our list, perhaps a lot higher than you figured he’d get.
This places him above Smokepurpp, and below the best brown boy to ever do it, NAV.
I really hope that Blueface keeps improving, because his recent singles have been really
enjoyable and now that he’s blown up after getting an initial push from memes, I think
he could really put something impressive out.
Not that bad at all.
(Outro)