Billboard Top Ten for my Birthday Week: Number 5

Shawty Lo
Units in the City


That awkward look on his face and tweaking of his jaw is your first hint...

I spent a few minutes wondering where I remember the name Shawty Lo from, so I looked him up on wikipedia, because I’m a busy, busy man. He was in D4L. They released “Laffy Taffy”. Interestingly enough, he was locked up during that, so he has made exactly… fuckall in his career.

This is one of those albums that you know is going to be bad, you’re here to read how bad.

Straight off the starting line I was bored by this. The beat for “100,000” is set up for a run of about a minute, not 3:41. I mean, I appreciate that he went against the shitty-rap-intro grain, but instead of giving me something in that, he gave me a really long shitty rap intro. As this is my first time listening to this album, I’m worried by the title. Most rappers talk about millions… am I to believe that he’s not even good enough to pretend millions of dollars?

Oh… this should be a fun journey.

The club banger, (I use that term lightly for this song), “Dey Know” is the second track on the album. Listening to it outside of the context of not-really-listening-to-it, the production sounds like second-rate production from a third-rate producer’s bastard child.

The remainder of the album is full of strange lines like “I’m yawning ‘cause I’m horny” and “Nigga say he from the west side/Goddamn, it must be two sides” (strangely enough, this is on a song talking about how he’s done everything and been everywhere). The fact that they were said in Shawty Lo’s constantly strained voice, (like a great-grandfather without glasses reading fine print out loud as a bedtime story), made annoyances out of lines that would have just been hilarious.

You’ve seen movies where they hammer bamboo chutes under a prisoner’s fingernails as torture, right? They don’t just, KA-BLAM, hammer it all the way in, do they? They tap it slowly, millimeter by millimeter, so it hurts more. That’s what it feels like when Shawty Lo stretches out his words at the end of each and EVERY FUCKING LINE ON THIS ALBUM! I don’t know if he’s learned how to emphasize yet.

Shawty Lo is probably, quite literally, retarded. I don’t mean retarded, stupid. I mean literally, short-bus, fucking retarded. I’m glad you asked why I say that. With songs like “Dunn Dunn” which has a chorus that repeats, in part: “Dunn, dunn, duh, duh, dunn, done it all,” you have to at least consider the possibility.

As far as the beats went, I found my mind wandering between two questions. The first question was “How many Ataris did they have to use to get that beat?” the second was “They got Terri Schiavo on production?!” (the only logical explanation I could find for the coma-inducing, changeless, mundane, pedestrian, boring, mind-numbing beats).

I honestly can't be totally negative about the album. Other than the music, it was pretty good.

Best Tracks: “100,000,” “Live My Life,” “Got Em 4 The Lo”

Pros:
- At least he kind of knows what a rhyme is... maybe. A for effort.
- The mixing is terrible. This wouldn’t usually be a good thing, but the beat usually is mixed well over Shawty Lo’s vocals.
- I usually have three things under “pro”… here’s one.

Cons:
- Stole Soulja Boy’s flow on “Let’s Get It”
- I think it might be worse than souljaboytellem.com.
- The album exists.

Overall Score: 5%