Kookei’s freshness has worn off in this latest album.
If rap is the new punk, then Kookei is following this trend: a few of the tracks here are under two minutes, and only two are over three. But Uptheviolence may be his longest yet and the first one where he abandons a verse-hook structure, something he excelled at on his first three tapes. And it is hardly an achievement to celebrate. The level of violence on the new songs goes up but the quality of the music is down.
The first two of his albums pissed off a lot of people (among listeners and rappers). Rumor has it somebody set his family house on fire. Kookei made enemies by dissing people left and right, but also by the way he did it. The Detroit MC’s whispering flow threw outrageous stuff over un-Michigan-like production, and bad mixing gave it a rough sonic texture. The disses worked because they also were carefully structured and memorable.
Sadly, the same can’t be said about Uptheviolence. The beats are generic Detroit production (except maybe the first track), and Kookei doesn’t even making a stab at a good hook on any of them. This is just one 44-minute-long mediocre track, lacking in focus and structure. Half the songs could be skipped. The rest is a pile of lines, ranging from great to awful, with the top level of ignorance. There are plenty of quotable bits, bordering on being gross and funny as hell: “If it ain’t no more tight pussy in the city I’m gonna hit a dyke \ Unkie says gas prices too high he finna need a bike” (“Pair of Dice”).
Kookei is among the top three the most ignorant rap artists today, the other two being Bandgang Javar and Rio da Yung OG. Yet since the first tape he aspired to be something more than a street peddler of jokes. Maybe it’s time to tone down the violence and get a stab back at a verse-hook structure. It worked perfectly. Now it doesn’t.
