The best way to describe Post Malone’s new album, “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” is complete vulnerability and angst. His lyrics are a mix of him flexing his wealth and him dealing with the drain of holding up stable relationships in Hollywood.
With this latest full-length project, we can bear witness to the aftermath of Redd’s public heartbreak and the music that inspired it as he jumps back-and-forth between desperately craving the company of his former lover and wishing her good riddance.
The album, which happens to be the band’s fourth in just over a year, comes following a dramatic summer that involved two canceled albums, the expulsion of Ameer Vann, one of the group’s lead vocalists, and the success of its own Beats 1 Radio show.
The album’s name is inspired by the Six Flags amusement park in Houston that shut down in 2005. Sprinkled with ill-advised beat changes, the album has many sections and parts –– almost like a real amusement park.
On April 16, hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the esteemed Pulitzer Prize for music, making him the first artist not belonging to either the jazz or classical genre to do so. Lamar’s album “DAMN.” received the prize almost exactly one year after the album’s widespread commercial success and two Grammy nominations.
Savage electrified the crowd by performing a variety of songs, not only from his discography, but also some tracks on which he is featured. He rapped over his verses in “Rockstar,” “Gucci On My” and “Sneakin.”
His latest release, “Lil Boat 2,” released on March 9, shows the now 20-year-old rapper largely abandoning his original sound, embracing trap music both with his choices of beats and featured artists, which include Offset, 2 Chainz and Quavo. Several of these songs get quite monotonous, but there is enough good in the tracklist to keep the album afloat.
Noname’s use of this genre as a staple of her music marks a key difference in her style of rap in comparison to other popular female hip-hop artists. In short, it allows her to do what so many others in the genre fail to do in their attempts to mimic their more mainstream predecessors. She does not try to rap in the harsh, aggressive ways that are characteristic of some prominent female rappers like Iggy Azalea and Nicki Minaj, and the result is something raw and genuine, a refreshing and honest work of art.
These lyrical themes are evident from the first track on the album, “For My Pethis track, Joey raps about how difficult it can be growing up black in America. It’s a great opening track, and its calming, yet upbeat production draws the listener in with soft synthesizers and horns behind a groovy drum rhythm. His lyrics also seem to summarize the purpose of the album.
“Music is a form of expression,” Joey raps. “Imma use mine just to teach you a lesson.”