We Tryna Party, by AJG

As a guy that prides himself on being pretty learned in music, I'm not sure I know when the phenomenon of made up words for songs, albums, and subgenres began. Maybe it was those countercultural bands, using words that were anagrams of drug references to sneak the lingo in and get an inside joke out to share with their fans..
That would make the fact that I'm quite used to them somewhat telling, I suppose. I've tolerated them before; Crunk, for example. I liked the 808's and rawness of it. It used the simplest instruments to make booming distorted sounds. Not unlike Punk.
Still, the "Crunk" sound, championed and pioneered by Lil Jon and (to a much greater extent) Three 6 Mafia, has its downside too; e.g., when Jon wrote tracks for two r&b singers, with an almost "eh, what the hell?" level of nonchalance, and accidentally took a previously awesome sound commercial.
So, I was a bit pissed off, as a punk at heart - it was like the changeover from the acidic nihilism of '77 to the sometimes mind-numbing Post Punk that would follow years later.
I suppose that was why I always appreciated "Hyphy", yet another made up word for a musical subgenre. If Crunk was the underground Punk movement that lost its steam in the beginning of the 80's, Hyphy was the Alternative Underground that provided a decent chaser for those who enjoy simple rawness.

Hyphy, being 'dance music' in its most primal sense, tends to take a more minimalist approach, melodically, and sometimes overall. I've heard Keak Da Sneak shit that's so quiet, yet so tense and moody I got minor chills.
Granted, none of it is quite surpassing Eno-levels of subtlety and composition, but let's just be honest: beats aren't and never have been an auteur's game. They're mainly built on very short loops, and chord changes are things that, if brought up in conversation with many rap producers, would result in a puzzled expression not unlike a dog that has been told an anti-semitic joke.

sadly, (for the segue of the week), none of that aforementioned subtlety or minimalism is present here. just BITCHES. and lots of them apparently. no, I don't refer to islamic afterlife numbers, but the sheer amount of times the word BITCH is used, so clearly and perfectly enunciated that it suddenly didn't seem to be so far removed from the romantic poet's lexicon (if keats ever called a girl a BITCH, he'd say it lyrically like this). it just seems like those BITCHES were weighing heavily on his mind when he wrote this, or at least while recording it, because it stands out, as if it were the only word capitalized in a paragraph of entirely lower case letters.

This is the kind of hamfisted anthem I'd imagine if Soulja Boy wanted to help cross Aphex Twin over, if he did the entire track first on a Frootyloops 3 demo then sent it to England and told him to add the hihat, but "not to overdo it".
The clunky manner in which this is executed is further shown through the lyrics, or as we in Scheezyland prefer, the "Ain't Shakespeares". One of these Paul Banks-sized gems of erstwhile poetry is as follows:
Tell your girl that she can kick it like the b*** know karate
, hastily followed by zomgroflmao on the Youtube video for Drake's "Forever" instrumental, which is obviously the truth, as it explains the little stop/start couplet mid 2nd verse so perfectly that you couldn't feasibly make that up.

I admit I've taken some inflections over time, perhaps snarling a little bit more than I normally would because that's how so-and-so-personal-hero-in-back-of-my-head might do it, but I go further BACK for musicians to steal ideas from; so, while most rappers are trying to croak like Wayne, I take a little bit of Lou Reed's deadpan sneer thing, or Mark E. Smith's enunciation.
After all, you should always bear in mind, AJ, that most people reviewing hip hop are generally short on memory and even shorter on imagination. If you read the times, you can go back to the 70s or 80s and snatch something fairly unknown, make it brand new, and be called a flogging genius (now if only I had some witty way to add Molly to the end of this sentence).

AJ, and I insist on calling you AJ, cos AJG makes me think of MJG and 8Ball, and it's taking my all to refrain from another “Crunk is Punk” tangential menstruation, my critiques are misplaced, at best; Hyphy, much like it's forebear, Crunk, is very much a genre of music that succeeds on a subconscious level. It's psychosomatic. You hear, you're off the couch, more or less.

The thing that's probably keeping you from exceeding the Soundclick Circuit at this point is that at the end of the day, this song is a bit of a boorish creature, at the end of the night. It's a dullard, it's Buzz J. Killington, complete with the fascinating story about the bridge.

The synths aren't airy enough to have their desired effect of trance-esque halcyon. The punchlines aren't potent enough to warrant cutting the track out from under them. The voice itself has the sense and sensibility of self-satisfaction (4x fast), which strikes as an almost tangible reminder of the sub-par delivery and lyricism.

I imagine the rule of pop music that's truly reveling in its poppiness, like much of the Soulja Boy School of Choruses, is not to make the listener roll his eyes too quickly from a particularly clumsy lyric; my eyes glazed over the moment that alcoholic intoxication was compared in sensation to buckshot removing the back of my skull and the majority of my face... and that was the second line.

Of course, the last time a line turned me off so quickly was Ke$ha, or however you spell it, as she wasted perfectly good Jack Daniels to brush her teeth. So perhaps critical damnation is a good thing sometimes.