Lonzo Is A Small Ball Rapper
In the spirit of full disclosure I should say up front that this really isn’t a full album review as much as it’s a review of the first half of every song on the album because there wasn’t a single track on the album good enough that I didn’t eventually tap out on and skip to the next one.
That being said, I'm not in the hating business so let me give some props. Is Lonzo a better rapper than myself? Sure, I guess...so there's that. The beats? I'm not gonna lie, pretty good. I would say more than half of the tracks I caught myself head-bobbing while also thinking, "damn, his flow is whack!"
And that's exactly what it was with this album. The lyrics weren't terrible, there were actually a few good rhymes that legitimately made my ears perk. One of his lines off of track Zo2 went, "With them Bs, issa movement/And I dropped out of school cause I'm smarter than student//Only one year I was done with the Bruins/Slaving for free, I was offered to move it." Pretty clever and funny, I wouldn't compare it to anything off of Illmatic but it's good.
His flow was just terrible, that's pretty much all it came down to. He literally sounded like he was just talking to a microphone while giving a goddamn interview or something. I picture him walking into the booth, staring at LaMelo pretending to be Rachel Nichols who asks him, "Lonzo, tell me why you left UCLA", and then Lavar dropping the beat from the mixer while Lonzo just gives his natural answer but in somewhat rapping form. Eazy-E, who legit just read line-for-line on Straight Outta Compton while Dr. Dre placed each line into the track, sounded a million times better than Lonzo.
I wish I could make the joke that Zo’s flow is so awkward that it’s the rap equivalent of his jumpshot but it’s actually worse than that. In fact, if his flow was an NBA jumpshot it’d be Markell Fultz.
Look, I know I said I'm not in the hating game even though that’s what this whole blog has been, but I wouldn't say it's the worst album I've ever heard. My buddy put a mixtape together sophomore year of high school that makes Lonzo sound like KRS-One. So he’s got that going for him.
