Review Summary: Supermarket 2.0
This trend of established hip-hop rappers turning to alternative as a means to “experiment”, and venture away from the bass-boosted, uptight sounds of their usual art, has seem to become the new aesthetic in the landscape of mainstream music. Memories of the colossal disaster of Kid Cudi’s 2015 psychedelic effort, “Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven”, and last year’s cheeky, comical “Supermarket” by another established artist in Logic, are invoked in horror. Even Machine Gun Kelly has taken the route to heart, yet has been the only one to have successfully navigated the transition, with his rap-rock hybrid “Hotel Diablo” earning widespread marks. The truth is, the road taken by these well-cemented rappers for their “experimental phase”, has only ended in laughs and sheer bafflement. Solely, because it fits nowhere near dear to their identity. It’s essentially, the easy option for hip-hop artists to jump out of rapping, and attempt a sort of versatility and showing the world that “Hey guys! I’m more than just a rapper!” Unfortunately for Oakland’s very own G-Eazy, the bewilderment continues in top, comedic form with his debut to the alt-sphere in “Everything’s Strange Here”.
The pairing of clever wordplay, and shiny West Coast beats that have done G-Eazy due service over the past decade, are nowhere to be found. Instead, it’s been viciously scrubbed by generic, emotionless acoustics, along with undoubtedly, the worst vocals by any rapper who’s ever taken this brief route to date. The closest we ever get to just even a typical G-Eazy track is in the radiant, reminiscing “Nostalgia Cycle”, which feels more of a scrap-off from his upcoming album, “These Things Happen Too”, rather than actually fitting itself into this experiment. The entire track-list reeks of Logic’s own Supermarket, with similarities between the two revered constantly throughout the snooze fest. The woozy, heavy Mac Demarco-inspired “Free Porn Cheap Drugs”, a boring take on his need to break free from the bustling lifestyle of being a rapper, is eerily similar, if not identical, to the Mac Demarco-produced chill bender “Vacation from Myself” by Logic from Supermarket. Both in premise and in its druggy, head-spinning production. To put it awfully blunt, it is as if G-Eazy plagiarized the foundations of that project from the artist most closely associate him with, and tried to spin it to make it his own. Might as well smack off the actual title and rename this “Supermarket 2.0”, because that is exactly what this is; a carbon copy.
Nothing about “Everything’s Strange Here” bears any coherence to continue past its initial play. The ultimate eyesore that beats it all out of this insufferable corpse is the Marshmello-produced, Charlie Puth rip-off “Stan By Me”, a dreadful effort at contrasting love towards the obsessive tendencies of fandom. The dolefully sung lines of, “But your love’s for sale, you got Only Fans’/you sent three DMs when I found your ‘Gram”, is the testament to the bull*** and misery that this 35-minute nightmare of an attempt is engulfed by. Those two lines alone should be tagged, bagged, and sent to the fiery depths of hell. The damning epitome of G-Eazy's take on the alt-sphere, is more than enough defined by those two horrific lines alone. It in fact, manages to outpace and outdo every other awful take attempted by hip-hop artists on the genre to date. It is the ultimate compilation of how to rip apart a whole genre from the waist down, and terraform it into something horrible, to something completely void of heart and emotion. Once again, another victim of the “rapper goes alternative” phase has been woefully sacrificed.
