Dear Mr. Wall,
After listening to your sophomore album Get Money, Stay True, it is obvious that an intervention needs to be held on behalf of the hip-hop community. Your fellow MC, Nas, claimed hip-hop was dead on his last album, and it's now clear albums like Get Money, Stay True should be rounded up and questioned about the killing.
We understand that between promoting SwishaHouse records, designing custom grills and detailing cars, you may not have enough time to devote to your music, but we must insist you stop making music altogether if it is going to be this bad. The rap coming out of Houston, your hometown, has been riding a wave of successful artists like Chamillionaire, Slim Thug, Lil' Flip and Mike Jones, but Get Money, Stay True is an album H-Town will want to forget.
In every way possible, your album fails to meet even the lowest standards of your genre, standards that regrettably have been on the decline as of late. The production was forgettable; each song was so similar to the one before it that it was hard to determine when one song ended and the next began. To say that your lines were recycled would be like calling the ocean damp. There is no possible way you could have made it more clear that "you on your grind." The number of times you referred to money — whether you called it bread, dough, stacks, bank, paper or our new favorite, ching — dominated your cookie-cutter lyrics.
Throughout the album, you ridiculously likened yourself to various characters including, but not limited to, NBA players Steve Kerr and Yao Ming, resident monsters Godzilla and King Kong, real and fictional boxers "Sugar" Shane Mosely and Clubber Lang, Major Payne, Albert Einstein and magician David Blaine. But in truth, after listening to this turd of an album, it seems evident you have more in common with Milli Vanilli or Paris Hilton.
The only redeemable parts of the album were those performed by prominent featured guests. Jermaine Dupri's production on "I'm Throwed" and Snoop Dogg's guest lines on "Everybody Know Me" represented all of the handful of minutes that were remotely tolerable. With "Tonight," we are given the obligatory thug love song, and if lines like "love makin' under the sheets make the mission complete" are the best you can come up with, we highly doubt that you are much of a romantic in your personal life. Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker guest produces "Slidin' on The Oil," on which rapper Expensive Talent displays an awful voice that can best be described as some sort of whisper-yelling. The single, "Break 'em Off," is one of the few beats with potential, but unfortunately you are unable to do enough with it to prevent the song from joining the countless others that will be forgotten almost as soon as they are heard.
Look, it's nothing personal — you are not the first person to set new lows in the hip-hop community, and your previous work with other artists like Kanye West, Nelly and Mike Jones wasn't bad. We understand that this specific type of hip-hop has its place in the genre and that music can be devoid of meaning or substance yet still be considered to have quality. But Get Money, Stay True at its best points sounds like it was mailed in, with beats and lyrics that have been heard a thousand times before and at its worst, a disgrace to the city of Houston and to us, the hip-hop community. Undoubtedly, this will not be the last time your name will grace the front of CD covers, and we can only hope for all of our sakes that next time you will pull yourself away from your other enterprises and try a little harder.
Sincerely,
The Hip-Hop Community
Grade: 1 out of 5
