Ludacris - Theater of the Mind: Album Review
Ludacris, Theater of the Mind (Def Jam, 2008)
Ludacris is big time now. A couple of years ago, he was in that movie Crash, which cleaned up at the Oscars. Last year, the TIs let him win the rap album of the year award for an album hardly anyone really seemed to like. Was calling his new album Theater of the Mind an attempt to rub his newfound success in our faces [||], or is this a genuine attempt to make a pretentious artistic masterpiece? Let's have a look.
INTRO
The guy who makes the announcement at the beginning is just obnoxious. And this Office Rawse-type beat is just not conducive to one of these fierce intro verses.
UNDISPUTED
Luda and Floyd Mayweather's LCD version of Ghostface's "The Champ." Luda actually spits some pretty ridonkulous punchlines, but this production kinda ruins it. It's too southern, and it's too cheap-sounding.
WISH YOU WOULD
The anticlimactic collabo with T.I. Remember they used to have beef? But I heard the TIs had them get together and patch things up, lest it turn into another Biggie-Pac situation. They should have called this "I Do It for the Money."
ONE MORE DRINK
The requisite T-Pain feature. Look out for this one on a shitty commercial rap radio station near you any minute now.
CALL UP THE HOMIES
Luda heads out to LA to meet up with the Game to holler at some beeyotches and engage in some ignorance. If it wasn't for the piss poor budget Dre production, this might be somewhat amusing.
SOUTHERN GANGSTA
Like a southern rap version of the BET show American Gangster, with narration by Ving Rhames, and guest raps by Officer Rawse and Playaz Circle. (Remember them?) A true clusterfuck.
EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS
Chris Rock is funnier on this than he was on his entire last HBO special. And this chorus is one of the more amusing things Luda has come up with since, I don't know, "Area Codes?" It's too bad the production couldn't be any more limp.
WHAT THEM GIRLS LIKE
New Rule: You can't have a song featuring Chris Brown and a song called "I Do It for Hip Hop" on the same album. And no this nigga didn't just rip off Biggie's intro from... what was that, "Dead Wrong?"
NASTY GIRL
Speaking of which, here's a song called "Nasty Girl." It's got Plies on it, if you like Plies.
CONTAGIOUS
Jamie Foxx is a truly miserable singer. It's silly the way he goes from sounding kinda like Marvin Gaye, to sounding kinda like Ron Isley. Unfortunately, they'll probably have to release this as a single to justify spending whatever it cost to have him appear on this. Unless he did it on the strength. Luda does seem to have a lot of celebrity friends these days.
LAST OF A DYING BREED
The requisite Wayne feature. If you blink, though, you'll miss his guest verse. And there's no autotune sung chorus or anything, thank god. Oddly enough, Luda seems to be touting his dedication to the art of MCing here, as if he was a backpacker. Is he not aware of his audience? Or does he feel guilty about the bulk of his recorded output?
MVP
And here he does an actual song with Primo. I guess he should at least be commended for throwing Primo some work - though you have to wonder how his fee compared to some of the other bums who worked on this album. The beat is just alright. It's solid, as far as past his prime Primo is concerned, but it doesn't really seem to fit this album, or the overall Luda aesthetic.
I DO IT FOR HIP HOP
The anticlimactic Nas and Jay and collaboration. This was the best beat they could find for this? How come they couldn't have used the Premier beat? Now that would have been a headline! My theory: there's some sort of nasty beef between Premier and Jay, and also maybe Premier and Nas. It might have to do with Premier's noted fascination with pr0n. Do Nas and Jay know something about him that we don't?
DO THE RIGHT THING
Spike Lee, who's never been particularly well spoken, encourages us to wake up at the very beginning of this. Again, it's one of those things you could miss, if you blinked while it was happening. Then Luda and Common proceed to kick preachy message raps. It's the 2008 hip-hop equivalent of that TLC "Waterfalls" video that used to come on MTV ad nauseum circa 1995.
COMMENTS: What a waste. At different points on this album, Luda kicks some of the stronger raps I've heard from him. But the production is uniformly lackluster. Even the one with Premier would have been way better as a Nas song than a Ludacris song. And the concept is just silly. Only the one with Chris Rock is genuinely amusing. Not all of the rest of them are truly obnoxious, but a lot of them are.
BEST TRACKS: "Everybody Hates Chris" "MVP" "Do the Right Thing"
BONUS VIDEO: "One More Drink"
