My friends Kevin and Will have put me up to a challenge. Because my knoweledge of rap music is very low, they are assigning me a song ever so often (currently every week), in which I get to respond with my opinion of it in a wonderful blog post!

So thus begins my very first song challenge, featuring Forever by Drake, ft. Kanye West, Lil’ Wayne, and Eminem. You can watch the music video here on Youtube.

Just by looking at the title you can tell that there’s quite an all-star assemblage of famous rappers. I’ve actually never heard of Drake before. I’m still not sure exactly who he is, but I’m pretty sure he’s this one. The good news is that I have heard of everyone else, although I must admit I’ve only heard of Kanye West because of his MTV stint thing.

(Just to prove I desperately need rock training, whenever I think of Drake, I think of this guy. Sad, I know.)

Anyways, on to the actual song itself.

The first thing I noticed was that the voice was being heavily autotuned, as now seems traditional with nearly every song. The second thing I noticed was the lyrics don’t make sense, but that’s to be expected, and the song sounds good anyway.

The starting beats are actually very nice, and they make the song. This is why I find it really annoying when the background beat was occasionally broken up and stopped during the lyrics “We know”, repeated about five times. This is about where the song started going downhill for me. A minute and thirty seconds in, the background beat hasn’t moved anywhere and it started getting stale. Then there started to be siren sounds, which actually sounded obnoxious.

The siren sounds are really obnoxious. Okay, ten seconds later they’re gone.

The song started picking back up once the sirens dissipated, and then the speaker shifted and the song started sounding less stale. The fog horn remained through the remainder of the song, but it wasn’t as obnoxious as the sirens which only reappeared occasionally.

Eventually the entire obnoxious measure was repeated and the song started getting stale again. The good news is that the song sounds really good after the sirens go away, so when that was repeated it actually was a welcome break.

Eventually Lil’ Wayne shows up and he drops some rhymes that actually don’t sound that bad. Of course he’s bragging about himself, but his lyrics make more sense than the rest of the song. Then there’s this really weird piano in the background, but it isn’t nearly as bad as the sirens.

Right about now it sounds like I hate the song, but I actually really like the lines sung by the first speaker, who I assume is Drake.

Eventually Eminem comes up and steals the show. And by this, I mean he isn’t that bad. He just isn’t that good either.

My overall opinion is that the song is “meets expectations” and gets a starting grade of B. It’s good enough to be added to my music playlist to be played again in the future when ever it comes up on shuffle, but I doubt I’ll actively seek it out often.

If I would improve the song, I would take the 6 minutes and drop every part that included the obnoxious sirens. I would then shorten every part to reduce the staleness. It may then appear that the measures are too repetitive, so I would change up the beat on the second and third repetition to build on the song. If the song was a little over four minutes and had these changes, I think it would be perfect.

Hopefully that meets the challenge and I look forward to the next time…

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