Before I Self Destruct Review

The diagnosis was right and the prescription was wrong. Having lost the room with a pop record, he made a set of stone faced street tracks with dim beats and no choruses worth repeating, as if the missing ingredient in the last one had been aggression rather than tunes. Baby by Me is the only real attempt at a single and it feels bolted on. Crime Wave and Death to My Enemies are perfectly fine and utterly interchangeable.

The voice is still distinctive and the delivery is still unhurried, but there is nothing to be unhurried about, no story he has not told twice and no melody to carry it. It arrived after two years of label delays into a landscape that had moved on to autotune and blog rap, and the album sounds like it knows that. This is where he stops being a rapper who matters and becomes a businessman with a back catalogue.