Sex over Love, Joe

I saw a reddit post the other day that was billed as a "confession" and its author described his business, which was an exotic car rental service. He said that he originally imagined that it would be for old dudes to rent fancy cars on their 65th birthday and shit like that, but pretty much all his business now is Instagram influencers who rent his cars (and yachts, and etc.) to act like they have more money than they actually do. Apparently, people will spend their last $1k in their accounts to just get some pictures in a Lamborghini. Pretty sad stuff, that we as a society have come to this. But also, it feels indicative of some higher truth abouts humans generally. Namely, that the ones who brag the loudest are often those with the least.

Blaqbonez raps almost exclusively about sex, to the point that I am fully convinced he is a virgin.

I mean, okay, I know that's the point. It's right there in the title. Props to Blaqbonez for making a promise and then following through on that promise. He thinks that sex is better than love, and he spends forty minutes attempting to convince the listener that this is true. It's a rather sad proposition, but I'm not here to review concepts of sex or love, I'm here to review the music.

The thesis statement is sound, but I wish that he would've done more with it then basically just list the things he does and the things he wants to do. Actually, I've heard this advice before about dirty talk in the bedroom: if you want to talk dirty, talk about what you've done, what you're doing, and what you're about to do. The advice works in bed. It works less well over listless rap beats.

I get that the type of hip hop that Blaqbonez peddles is not unpopular or uncommon. I will say that I dislike it and I know that I must be in the minority. The numbers don't lie. Listen to hip hop music on the pop charts and hear that a lot of it sounds like this—a sort of amorphous piano riff and light crackly trap beat and some idiot autotune-crooning about some dumb bullshit. This is boring but only because I'm actively listening. For a 22-year-old who doesn't give a shit about music beyond its wallpaper quality at a social gathering, passively listening because they don't care, this music is more than adequate. But we know this already. I am old and I am cranky. We know this too.

The thing that could've helped it clear the low bar for me would be if he took the subject matter of sex and did something interesting with it. Sex can be complicated! Sex can elicit emotions a lot more complicated than base horniness. I'm not saying that horniness is bad either; I can be a horny little gremlin like the best of 'em. But that's not enough to carry an album of music about sex. There are plenty of examples in the RC canon of artists that successfully made the subject of sex interesting. Jessie Ware made sex an act of celebration. Nakhane viewed intimacy through the lens of their queerness. Even Mclusky did something interesting with it—the hyperbole of "I'm tired from fucking too much" achieves the same purpose (i.e. that you start think these guys are virgins), but is at least funny in how exaggerated it is. Nothing too funny with Blaqbonez. He is sincere, and that is boring.

I could see an argument made for Sex over Love if the music was good, but it's not. There are glimpses of adequacy, but they bubble to the surface at rare moments over the course of the album, and then quickly pop. I feel like "BBC" was probably the song that got closest to being "catchy" in the way that I'd define it. But the lyrics sink it, sounding like a twelve-year-old attempting to type words into the PornHub search bar. I have no idea what percentage of listeners see the title of that song and think about the British TV station and what percentage sees the sex acronym. I know it definitely doesn't say anything good about me that I fell into the latter category. I also know that it doesn't say anything interesting about Blaqbonez that he made a song about his alleged BBC.

There's also the matter of the entire album objectifying women. The lyrics seem to imply that women only exist to sexually gratify men. I can't find any irony that might offset the sexism a little bit, and so it might just be an Occam's razor type of thing here. When Blaqbonez degrades women as "bitches" and "pussy" throughout this album, it's probably just easier to take him at his word and know that he's sort of a misogynist. It's also a lot easier that he is a boring misogynist. If this was provocative music or fascinating or catchy in any way, then we'd have some real shit to grapple with. This is for the best—Blaqbonez is boring, and so he sells no one on his views, which are not great to begin with.

Mainly, I'm just disappointed that Blaqbonez probably has a unique perspective, right? It's not like we cover African artists all that often in this music club. I bet you that Blaqbonez is an interesting 20-something and I bet that he'd have some cool stories to tell. But I'm disappointed that, instead of telling those stories, he wastes his time telling us the same gooned-up sex tropes that we've heard a billion times before. Save it for bullshitting with the pals, and keep it off of my already cliché autotuned pop rap.

I have heard enough, and I am ready to claim that Blaqbonez has never had sex in his life. Listen to Sex over Love again, and tell me I'm wrong. This dude is a fraud.

GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5