Review Summary: The bottom of the hip hop pyramid
Lets face it—nerd rap/nerdcore/whatever you call it has never been amazing (unless one counts Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" as part of the genre). Despite the genre's general mediocrity (aside from a select few), it was never consistently terrible. It was just stupid or generic. Unfortunately, however, there came the one act that took a genre that could simply be dismissed as "okay" and proceeded to made a gigantic joke out of it, which was then followed by millions of imitators that transformed the genre itself into a joke. That act, and the subject of this review, is
Teamheadkick, and to be honest with you i'm not even sure if they're 100% part of the genre (more on that later). Perhaps you know them if you've seen
Deadpool, as somehow 20th Century Fox decided that these guys' "Deadpool Rap" was perfect for the movie, but today i'm going to be focusing strictly on the 16-track
Sofa King Gamer (which actually includes the original version of "Deadpool Rap").
The music on
Sofa King Gamer itself is amongst some of the worst production jobs I have ever heard; the synths are basic and clashing with one another, and the bass is actually
overpowering everything else (except the vocals). As for flow, nobody ever taught these guys what flow is—there is, simply put, no flow at all here. As for the lyrics, they didn't even try—they just got a bunch of 12 year olds together, had them play Xbox for 3 hours, proceeded to have them write whatever they wanted on the iPhone notes app and then brought in Generic Mainstream Rapper #375,271,868 to spruce up the sexual hijinks that are
the stereotype of the term "gamer" nowadays. Highlights of this musical genius include:
iGame
Cosplay girls are nerdy
I like 'em kinda dirty
Especially if they're curvy
-iGame
The day's done, now its time to game
I'm gonna get so drunk I forget my name
Load up the Xbox, cause its time to play
When it comes to Call of Duty I dominate
-My Girl Hates Me (I Play CoD)
There's also glaring failures in research; the most blatant example being in "Saints 4 Life"; as much as a die-hard fan of
Saints Row would probably like to disagree, the fourth installment of the game (the one touched upon in this album) is as far from gangster as one can get, but Teamheadkick seem to be stuck in the past of
Saints Row 2—they do their damndest to convince both the listener (and maybe even themselves) that
Saints Row IV is a gangster game despite the fact that they proudly proclaim to be "music by gamers for gamers".
It appears that they may have some degree of self-awareness, that they perhaps know they cannot rap to save their lives, or maybe believe that they've been 100% "nerd rap" for too long and need to attempt to expand their boundaries ASAP, so they've tried their hand at hard rock on this album as well—resulting in embarrassing moments such as the aforementioned "My Girl Hates Me", which consist of nothing but basic loops that anyone in Magix Music Maker could do, and ironically all but mute the bass (which is the loudest of all on the hip hop tracks). A godawful
rap metal remix of the "Gta vs Saints Row Rap" that shows up earlier in the album serves as the album closer, proving how Teamheadkick can't decide whether or not it wants to be a nerd rap group or discount Dragonforce with a side of Hinder and Linkin Park, and leaving the poor listener with any semblance of a brain on their knees, begging for mercy, wishing that they had listened to quite literally anything else instead.
Sofa King Gamer embodies everything wrong with gaming culture, even today—propagating the negative gamer stereotypes that have been around for virtually the entire decade (gamers treating women as objects, being a bunch of fat, horny teenage losers, living in mommy's basement with no job) and churning out some of the worst compositions ever recorded. Maybe I would be a tiny bit nicer if this successfully appealed to the annoying 12 year olds who scream racial slurs at people over Xbox Live, but i'm sure mommy wouldn't appreciate them playing music that has the evil F word in it. All in all, this album is a failure in every way, and it's another turd in a sea of godawfulness that proves that nerdcore has become the new crunkcore; stupid, stereotypical, misogynistic, poorly-made, poorly thought out, and straight up irredeemable.
