FiyaStarter.com - Fiya on the Brownstone with Malik Sinsear

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“My team ALWAYS plays better
at home. We don't travel well.”
-The Good Doctor
...with a sex reference

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Brooklynite spitting flames on the current state of his first love, Hip-Hop from his stoop in Bedstuy. He may be from NY, but his love for the culture is first and foremost, so don't expect your typical east-coast bias, on this block. Malik is simply here to kick knowledge and wisdom for your understanding.

FiyaStarter RATING =

Fiyaballs

Album Review

Pharrell Williams - In My Mind
It's No Mc D.L.T.
by: Malik Sinsear, for Entertainment

Well, we shouldn’t act at all surprised, because we knew it was coming. You see, Pharrell Williams had teased us with little rhymes here and there before, but when he dropped that “suicide wrist-red” line on the Snoop song, you could practically set your watch until the official announcement came down that he would release a solo album. I won’t lie; I thought the shit was tight. Yeah, right up there with Kanye’s “Miracle whips” (an expensive white car, for the dumb) line.

…yes, I’m being facetious again, people.

In My Mind, the debut album from lil P, is the type of project Rap and R&B fans have wanted forever…only from crazy Lauryn Hill or maybe the multi-talented Yu-Gi-Oh man himself, Mos Def. It’s set up to be the real best of both worlds. You got your rapping side, and you got your singing side. It’s the Mc D.L.T. of music projects. Or so we thought until we heard the lead single, You Got It Like That featuring last season’s Nelly Furtado aka Gwen Stefani, where Pharrell is all over the place with rhymes like:

From Louisville to Jimmy Choos he's real,
She know the time, she see the Richard Mille
Plat- double skeletal, Tourbillion.
It just like her body move, it turns her on,
She like the way my hands use her body for hand warmers,
And all our car doors go up like Transformers.

Pharrell rhyme answer key:

-Shoes, whatever.

-Richard Mille produces expensive watches called Tourbillion.

-Girls like that expensive stuff, especially the kind they don’t know shit about.

-Girls will give up the panties even quicker if the ride is altered.
-At the end of the day, I’m still a nerd, so don’t fuck with my 80’s robot collection, nigga.

Hmm, I might have to give that song another chance. Anyway, as far as the Rap side of Mind goes, I felt like a heroin addict chasing that damn dragon looking for something to top the “suicide” line and, sadly, I never found it. Don’t get me wrong, there are a couple nice joints featured. Keep It Playa, featuring Slim Thug, sounds like a single, and How Does It Feel, which opens the set, shows Pharrell's (or his alleged ghostwriter’s) potential. But, I officially ended my search for that next hot line when the guy uttered, “I ordered the Phantom coupe that's smoke pipe grey, and the interior was like crack rock beige.” Ehhhh, nice try, but it's still a force.

On the R&B side, where I wasn’t expecting anything but a bunch of bootleg Prince falsettos, it was actually okay. I mean, it WAS full of a bunch of bootleg Prince falsettos, but the production picked up and masked Pharrell’s inability to sing just enough for you to give him a pass. He seems a lot more believable singing about romancing girls than he does about growing up a tough life around drug dealers. That Girl featuring Snoop Dogg is a perfect example of this, as is the Number One song with Kanye. Too bad the video just ruins it for me. It really is the gayest three minutes in urban America, at the moment.

*Note: Sorry if the R&B portion of my review wasn’t as in depth as you would have liked it to be ladies and queers, but I had to throw it together before the FS submission deadline. Originally, I was going to do the Rap segment of the review and Shaunie Blaze was going to do the singing, but when I saw her portion begin with the sentence “Oh my God, I can’t believe Pharrell hasn’t said anything to T.I. about swagger jacking the Louie scarf look,” I just told her the editor changed his mind. Damn shame, too. That whole thing would have gone perfect with the Mc D.L.T. picture. Oh, well.