What I don't want to do in situations like this is change my beliefs to fit the narrative of "this is a piece of shit." There is a way to make the case that the album sucks without having to say shit that I don't believe in. A bad album is allowed to have good qualities, and do certain things right, and look in certain ways like the type of art that I might tend to appreciate. The trick is to name them and then make it clear that the album is bad despite those qualities, not because of them.
Beautifully Broken was a bad album, and I did not like it. Bro country is tough to listen to in any context, and it was tough here, even though Jelly Roll bent over backward to distract you from the fact that this was bro country through and through. Aesthetically, I guess, since the subject matter tended away from beer and women and toward pain and substance abuse, but still. Still. This is pop music with country trappings. This is Morgan Wallen with a better accent coach and with maybe some semblance of a conscience and sense of duty and empathy.
If I was committed to tearing it down completely, here's what I would've said: I think that Jelly Roll should be more solutions focused. This was my first thought upon hearing this album for the first time, not recoiling necessarily from what was being said, but more from how it sounded. That Jelly Roll is just talking about how much life sucks but how he is going to somehow find the strength to prevail. My first thought was that that's boring, and that he at no point offers any sort of solution to the problems he is facing, and that that would be "irresponsible" of him, or something. These were primary thoughts, and I'm writing them here, not because I believe them, but because I found the thought process interesting, I guess.
Because the more I thought about it, the more I figured that solutions-based music from Jelly Roll is not something I would want or need either. And that would go against what I always preach on this blog. Here's what I actually preach: telling your story is enough to heal. The act of writing, the act of revealing a truth about yourself, is the thing that helps, even without any idea on how to "fix" that problem that you found. That's the whole point of being here, on this stupid blog. We write about the art by writing about ourselves so that we better understand ourselves so that we better understand the art.
It borders on being too optimistic, but I think it's truer to myself and what I believe to look at Beautifully Broken like a collection of short stories, most of which are Jelly Roll speaking his truth, out here in public, in an act of self-care. I can say that this was a valuable exercise for the speaker, because I've seen that exercise in practice ten thousand times. If you are troubled, if you have issues, if you're feeling like shit because of something you did or because of something someone did to you, then I say: keep talking about it. And that's what Jelly Roll is doing.
Nothing about my refrain of talking about it (or blogging about it, whatever the case may be) says anything about a requirement to speak with nuance and creativity and specificity, none of which Jelly Rolls displays a penchant for on this shit album. But for emotional catharsis, it's not needed. You just talk about it. Just sing about it. Just listen to the goddamn bro country album. Just try to see yourself in it.
Because I am such an acolyte of talking/writing through my shit, and because you have been a witness to a lot of it (either by choice or unwittingly), then you will not be surprised that the very first song on this album, "Winning Streak," absolutely fucking gobsmacked me. The first time hearing it was just an incredible whiplash, the cynical sneer on my face morphing into that pre-cry heaviness in the chest area over the course of about 25 seconds. I'm not so much of a monster to believe that this entire thing is some commercial pop ploy to steal my sympathy; the song is constructed in a way that I truly do believe that the emotions therein were based on the shit that Jelly Roll really felt, and feels. In that way, we build empathy, me and Jelly Roll. (The song un-stoned me to my soul, un-stoned me just like Jelly Roll, and it un-stoned me.)
I didn't need AA specifically to get by, but I love AA for what it can be for others. Sobriety usually boils down to: whatever works, man. AA works for a lot of people. Not participating in AA was a personal choice—I just did it a different way. The same can go for Beautifully Broken, I think. There's a way to feel empathy from other people, there's a way to rid yourself of the demons that are overtaking you, there's a way to find yourself in music, there's a way feel less sad by hearing the stories of other sad people... I'm just making a personal choice to not do anything of that through Jelly Roll's music. There are other ways. Whatever works, man. Beautifully Broken, despite that initial shock, does not work for me.
Jelly Roll makes an insane and desperate ploy to make me take this seriously, and I would if I could, but I can't. I cannot take seriously an album that features Machine Gun Kelly in a histrionic ballad. I cannot take seriously a country album from a dude who only switched from rap to country because country was selling better. I cannot take seriously a man who chooses to reveal their deepest, darkest selves in the most generic, cliché-ridden manner available to him. I just can't.
It's not that I can't find appreciation in the story, it's just that this isn't a fucking story in an AA church hall basement. This is music. These are songs. This is an album, ostensibly a work of art, created with alleged care. I agree wholeheartedly with the message of a song like "Little Light." I do! I think that we'd all be way better off if we chose optimism maybe 10% more than we typically do. But aren't there more interesting ways to make the case for that than a chorus that goes "I've been down the darkest road / Set fire to all my homes / One thing I learned in life / Save room for the little light"? There has to be. That's AI-generated bullshit. That's pap from a sixth-grade creative writing class.
Or like "Hear Me Out," how the chorus repeats something that I've been feeling for a good long while now, to an almost scary degree: "Hear me out, you don't know all the pain I'm feelin' / Tell me how I always feel like something's missin'." I hear something like that and say: oh wow, I feel that shit! And then I hear the whole song and say: oh wow, I've heard this song a thousand times before coming out of every grocery store speaker and mid-tier online college commercial this side of my parents' Alexa algorithm. It kinda hits the same points that I made (less directly) in the Katy Perry review—it's easy to feel oneness with the lyrics if the lyrics are specifically designed to reach as many ears as possible. That's the opposite of specificity. That's being generic. That's being a product, not art. It doesn't make you special, to hear yourself in these songs. You are not special. You are not unique. Neither am I.
We tell our stories to connect to others, share something about ourselves with them so that we are brought together. Pop music can't do that, because it directly conflicts with the ultimate purpose of that pop music—to be popular, to hit chart milestones, to move units. That artifice is always going to be there. I can hear myself in some of these songs (and some way more than others), but I can't get close, because never once does it feel like Jelly Roll is speaking directly to me. He can't. That's not what this bro country music does, or even could.
I just wanted to make it crystal clear that I hate this album for what it is, and not what it attempts to be. Beautifully Broken attempts to be the thing that soothes you after a rough day or a rough life. It attempts to tell Jelly Roll's story, and in that way build empathy between you and him, so that you can find solace in the challenges of your own life, and the strength to battle through them. But it actually is a really shitty and awfully corny bro country album sung by a hip hop never-was who does nothing to separate himself from any other bullshit pop country album that you can pick up for $13.99 at the local Target. I value the story. I don't value the music. This shit STINKS.
GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5
Postscript: I feel the need to follow-up on the last remark I made about Jelly Roll on this blog, back in the comment section this past September. Because I've done a lot of soul-searching on this. Soul-searching, and google searching. Some extremely shady google searches, honestly, mostly variations on "bunnie xo nude." Like the Who's Pete Townsend, I'm going to claim that I was looking up sexually explicit images for "research," and you're just gonna have to believe me. It was actually kind of surprising how little there was out there. Hopefully it speaks to how I did not perform actually intensive internet searches on the matter. But it probably also speaks to the internet not being the free-for-all devil's den that we always assume it is. Maybe it's a place where you can change, where previous sexually explicit images are at least mostly wipeable from the so-called permanent world wide web. So I didn't find any proof of this memory I have of stumbling onto a picture of porn star with her massive, face-tattooed, white-rapper husband and just being so fucking confused. That's okay. I've made peace with the fact that the deplorable shit that made me horny in the mid-'10s on such subreddits as trashyboners just simply does not exist anymore. And I've actually grown to appreciate its disappearance over the past week. I dunno, man, it seems like Jelly Roll has made strides to change. Dude is an inspiration to many. Not me, because his musical output is a fucking ballsack, but to others for sure. You can change. Listen to the music. You can change. Same goes for his wife. Pretty clear through the surface-level research I've done this week that these two are in love. Why does a former OnlyFans model have to be labeled as such for her entire life? Why should the most important thing about you be that there was at least one mostly nude picture of you on some fucking NSFW subreddit that I'm eventually going to regret naming here on this blog? You can change. We can change. Jelly Roll is more to me now than he was before. Before, he was the terrible rapper whose wife was a porn star. Now, he is a terrible country star whose wife has nothing to do with how terrible a musician he is.
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