I’m Not a Hype Man – DurtE

May 16, 2024

Reviews > Album Reviews > I’m Not a Hype Man – DurtE

I'm Not a Hype Man

DurtE

Sunday 5th June, 2011 by admin | 0 Comments

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(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Rapping from Northeast corner of our country is a guy named DurtE who came to FLH with his new album “I’m Not A Hype Man”. The first unfortunate part about the album is that my review isn’t going to be track for track, not because it all flows together as one piece, but because there is simply not enough to say about it. The production value was okay, it was engineered pretty well and in the technical sense the beats were just fine but the problem was the extreme lack of creativity. Most of the tracks DurtE puts up are about being hated on, smokin & drinkin, bein the underdog, bein caught up in too much bullshit. I’ve heard it all before. Though many rappers still do it that way today, most of them get away with it because their styles and how they write about these common things is what makes them great. Much like Tech N9ne, who he takes his flow from a good portion of the time.

Amongst the good beats he has a lot of driving guitar riffs as well as good use of accoustic and most of the drum work is straight. It gets a little R7B in some songs and hard in other, it’s a nice variety and that’s what I like to see on any album. But he’s not good at pulling off the vocals. They all sound very awkward and forced, in fact sometimes it sounds like he’s trying to emulate James Hetfield more than he is actually trying to put something of his own into the track (Walkin Thru Hell was just offensive). The rapping is the same price. As I said before he takes his flow style from Tech N9ne sometimes because he figured out how to do rapid fire. (As a side note to DurtE: You really need to avoid this, a lot of Tech N9ne’s critics have pointed out his tendency to do this because sometimes it gives him an excuse to not be creative for several bars. Check this) It’s just like drumming, if you can do it really fast good for you but that doesn’t make you a good drummer. A lot of his lines only rhyme on the end too, which is like a poem one would make an 8th grade. It just never really did much to stand out for me. He has a lot of guest spots too which is what kind of surprised me, since so many of his peers showed him a solid amount of support and that has to say something about his reputation out there. The problem with that though, is that most of the people he had on his tracks rapped circles around him, especially H8trid who appears on the album the most. There are even times when he slipped off beat a little bit but it wasn’t a lot. Regardless he can’t be doin that. That’s the biggest criticism of white rappers, period.

I’m not gonna say that I hated it though because I didn’t. There were a couple tracks I liked, A-Hole had me singin the chorus and the bouncing delivery made it work well and kind of reminded me of some stuff I’ve heard Blestenation do. Stay the Fuck Out of My Life sounded dangerously close to copying Dr. Steel’s style *cough* (Dr. Steel – Lament for a Toy Factory) . But overall there isn’t much I’m actually going to retain from the album. Just came across as another dime-a-dozen rapper . The bonus song was kind of funny, I wouldn’t keep it as a serious piece of music but the chorus “Cookies and a Blowjob” had me laughin pretty hard until that disgusting shit at the end (no spoilers go hear it yourself). Other than that the rest of your “let’s be funny” moments kind of flopped like a lot of the “Its time to be serious… fo real” moments. My overall grade for the whole album is a 5 because all I can say for it is it’s functional. The lines rhyme and the beats are alright. You might not be a Hype Man, but I would consider it so you can spend time studying how real rappers do it.

Track Listing