B-Wary

posted in: Artist Features • Urban

Critiquing ain’t easy. Invariably, you’re going to come across things you don’t love so much. Then it becomes a question of, Is this objectively bad, or is it just me? Typically the answer is the latter and you focus your commentary on the positive points that can be made. With Philadelphia producer B-Hookz, unfortunately, there’s little silver lining. Here’s the best we can come up with: It’s not really your beats, B-Hookz. It’s your MCs. Their lyrics are misogynistic and dumb, their flow is forgettable and the combination of the two sucks all the attention away from the actual production. In club banger, Let Me Dem The Lights, [sic] the MC lets loose a ramshackle rap about popping a certain female body part like it’s Juicy Fruit. The verses come off like the wild and unsophisticated sexual fantasies of a 13-year-old boy. If it were just one track, we’d simply skip it, but then there’s Break It Up and Dump It Back, which features even more juvenile erotica. As far as beats go, B-Hookz’s calling card seems to be a wailing siren at the intro to all his songs. Sounding the alarms up front is clever way to tell your audience that something big and bad is on the loose ”in this case, take it as a sign to run in the other direction.