Fighters: Kanye West, Pusha T, Big Sean, Common, John Legend, Teyana Taylor, 2 Chainz, Cyhi the Prynce, Kid Cudi, Malik Yusef, D’banj, Travis Scott and others
Trainers: Kanye West, Che Pope
Cut Men: Kanye West, Che Pope, Hit-Boy, Young Chop, Mannie Fresh, Lifted, Andrew “Pop” Wansel, Anthony Kilhoffer, Boogz & Tapez, Dan Black, Hudson Mohawke, Illmind, Jeff Bhasker, Ken Lewis, Mano, Mike Dean, Mike Will, The Twilite Tone, Tommy Brown, Travis Scott and others
Weight Class: Musical Supergroup
Notable Fire: Mercy (Feat. Kanye West, Big Sean, Pusha T & 2 Chainz), New God Flow (Feat. Pusha T & Kanye West), Bliss (Feat. John Legend & Teyana Taylor), Clique (Feat. Big Sean, Jay-Z & Kanye West)
Notable Trash: Creepers (Feat. Kid Cudi), To The World (Feat. Kanye West & R. Kelly)
Tale of the Tape: Getting a good read on Cruel Summer is exceedingly difficult. Why? Three reasons: 1) Judging compilation albums can be tricky, 2) Expectations were very high going in, and 3) We had all already heard half of it before it came out (not to mention the album leaked a week before it’s release date). To make matters worse, it’s only 12 songs and there are about 20 artists featured on this project.
Of the three, the fact that we’ve been riding around bumping literally five of these 12 tracks all (spring and) summer turns a potentially explosive album into one lacking bite (perhaps the album title was appropriate). This is not a criticism of those five records; while the singles are good, they severely drain the impact of an album with only a dozen songs.
Right off the top, Ye recruits R. Kelly to sing on the intro To the World, a generally uninspiring song, despite Kanye’s valiant effort to save the track with his verse. Listeners should be able to pick up on a steady improvement on Kanye as a rapper in recent years. HHSR even briefly discussed this a few weeks ago in a Memory Lane post. While he’s improved lyrically, his rhyme scheme still remains as entertaining as ever, “I need a new crib to hold my plaques/Rick Ross shit told me that/So I be all up in Goldman Sachs/Like ‘These niggas trying to hold me back/These niggas trying to hold me back’/I’m just trying to protect my stacks/Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax/Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax.”
Yeezy aka Francis Foreign Car Coppola’s creativity is unmatched (he even randomly dug up Ma$e for a verse on this album, it was decent too), yet his content has been increasingly centered around material goods and general stuntin of late, including rhyming about his neighbor Tom Cruise (Personally, I’d rather hear Juicy J rap about living next door to Kobe Bryant. It’s the funniest thing going in rap today). Even though he briefly attempts to justify the splurging on “Clique”, the excessive bragger-rap gets stale rather quickly, and can be detrimental if inserted into the wrong song. For instance, Yeezy nearly ruined “New God Flow” with his lame solo drill sergeant call-and-response at the end of the track. Furthermore, it’s getting to the point where this hip-hop head is tired of hearing Kanye tell me all about how much fresher he is than me when he has a history of rocking purses and skirts. But I digress.
That’s not fly. I don’t care how much money you have.
The more more I hear of him, the more I’ve come to enjoy Cyhi the Prynce. He adds something to just about every G.O.O.D. Music track he’s been on, and Cruel Summer was no different. On “The Morning”, Cyhi ended his verse with, “Haters wanna pull they pistol when they see me in this race car/But you can’t spell war without a AR/15 I was pushing carts at K-Mart/By 21 they said I’d be inside a graveyard/Can’t wait to get that black American Express/So I can show them white folks how to really play the race card.” Granted, we’ve heard the black card/race punchline before, but it was solid nonetheless.
If Kanye is the Don, Pusha T has definitely asserted himself at the Capo of the G.O.O.D. Music family, even if Big Sean has seen more recent mainstream success. His first verse on “New God Flow” was arguably the toughest on the entire album. Coming hot off the release of his Detroit mixtape, Big Sean’s contribution was solid, as expected. Still, some questions remain as far as the decisions that went into which tracks made the album and which were left on the cutting room floor.
While 2 Chainz currently has the streets on lock, his place on this project seems somewhat illogical. Aside from Mercy, he was featured on only two songs; a random 20 second flow on “The Morning” and a complete verse on “The One”, which was absolute trash, even by his standards. And why Chainz was even on a song with lyrical giants like Common (who appeared on only one song on the entire album) and Raekwon in the first place is hard to understand.
Some decisions were great though. In somewhat of a surprise, Teyana Taylor and John Legend’s work on the compilation album was outstanding, as “Sin City” and “Bliss” were two very strong cuts on the back half of the album.
Fight Night: Winner by majority decision
Admittedly, I thought this CD was wack on the first listen. Upon further review, it is a solid effort overall, but it was challenging to judge the project while including the proper weight of the five singles that have been out for some time. Had the album been 15 tracks, the release of the singles months in advance would not have robbed Cruel Summer of quite as much momentum.
Making a good compilation album is very difficult these days. You see groups such as G.O.O.D. Music, MMG and YMCMB attempting to diversify their rosters, yet they do not necessarily have the unified focus it takes to pull off a collaborative project that is truly special. We saw that singular focus with the Ruff Ryders, Roc-A-Fella and Dipset; that singular focus for each created a crew full of talented individuals that shared the same voice. G.O.O.D. Music is still searching for that voice, and while Cruel Summer is a decent album, it did not do enough to separate themselves from the Young Money’s and Maybach Music Group’s of the world.