My biggest let down of 2018: QUARTERTHING - Joey Purp

I realise that, in running a music blog, it would effectively be in my best interest to write about the most exciting artists, their recent escapades and releases, in order to keep up to date and current. As such, my newest article probably shouldn’t be about a disappointing album from an artist who my friends couldn’t get behind when I recommended him in 2016. This becomes even more so the case with the fact that the disappointing album in question was released nearly 6 months ago in September, last year. Having said that I felt so personally attacked and annoyed at the release that, 6 months later and having stewed appropriately and stared directly at the puddle of disappointment that this album has drowned in for so long, it is finally time for me to have my say.

Joey Purp is not a name that screams ‘2016 Tupac,’ despite his own claims on his first album. Yet iiiDrops still set him up as an exciting new force in the rap game. Part of the Chicago collective Savemoney alongside Vic Mensa, Chance the Rapper and Nico Segal (formally Donnie Trumpet), there was a sense that Joey wasn’t quite living up to the work of the rest of his clique prior to the release. However, iiiDrops gave him a style and an intelligent voice; finally, it was clear why they hung out with Joey and each contributed to the project, featuring alongside even more of the modern Chicago movement like Saba and Mick Jenkins. What struck me when hearing iiiDrops, though, wasn’t any of these features - in fact, ‘Girls @’ with Chance was one of my least favourite songs on the album. But rather it was Joey, his writing minimalist but gritty, his beat selection almost faultless and his vision seeming pretty fresh to me, operating on the peripheral boundaries of the game. Seeing his friends all rise to fame, he knew that this was his moment to grab the spotlight. This was no more evident than in the triumphant opener ‘Morning Sex’, opening the album with wild blaring trumpets sampling Phoenix Express, (the exact same sample used two years later on The Caters project) and giving the beat some space before:

‘I done been on both sides of the burner

I done witness both sides of the murder

I done seen a nigga killed, and seen a nigga kill a nigga

Tell me how you feel, I'll show how it feel to see a homicide.’

He expresses duality and regret throughout the album, as he’s torn apart by street violence but, growing up surrounded by it, he can offer no alternative. Joey shows a maturity and pain, telling the world that he’s tired; he’s been there watching some of his friend’s progress to the heights of fame, while others stay in the city with him and face everyday struggles, risking their lives and barely getting by. iiiDrops is far from a perfect album, but it’s full of one liners and promised a great introductory album to build on, while also having one of my favourite lines of the year:

‘You killin' niggas in your hood, you the KKK?’

So with all that in mind, finally, we get to QUATERTHING. I guess he thought it needed to be shouted. If I haven’t already made it clear, I was really looking forward to this album. Turning it on, my excitement felt justified. The first three songs were exactly what I wanted; they were smart and personal and I even put one as a track of the week and another in our birthday playlist. Promising stuff, let’s keep this momentum up… but no. This exciting start makes it even more painful to listen to the rest of the album, as it tells me that he hasn’t completely fallen off, he’s just ‘taken a different direction.’ Having listened to the whole album I genuinely believe it got its name from the fact that only a quarter of it is actually good. This project seems to lack a focus and movement. The first three tracks, including RZA’s feature sounding like some kind of demented monster, are good, conscious, hype tunes reminiscent of ‘Cornerstore’ and ‘Photobooth’ from his first project. The only other song of note is ‘2012’, an inoffensive bop that’s pretty good. This as I said makes up about a quarter of the album. The other three quarters … well.

He took all he had learned from his first album and did nothing with it. It feels like he had a release date and had only made the first three songs and then saw the current trap trends and thought he could slip into that lane easily enough.  He couldn’t. The album brings out some of the laziest writing and most slurred chorus’ that you’ll hear for a while. It’s painful for an artist to show such a drastic change from one album to the next when it doesn’t suggest any sign of growth. He has regressed with this release. Keep the earlier mentioned lyrics in mind and then try to make it all the way through the title track - I dare you. And then if you do that you can progress to the boss battle ‘Fessional/Diamonds Dancing’, one of the worst songs ever put out by a proven artist. The beat is actually pretty bouncy and exciting but it of course brings the inspired chorus:

‘Yeah, diamonds on me dancing, they for real

Yeah, you not 'bout that action, be for real

Yeah, play me 'bout that paper it's a drill

Yeah, diamonds on me dancing, they for real.’

How does he do it? Here, like a few other songs on the album, the song structure mirrors the trajectory of the project, where they have a promising start and then plummet beyond the realms of even being laughable. A prime example of this is a song like ‘Paint Thinner,’ the first 30 seconds of which are really strong, a mature conversation stressing about the life of his daughter, but then suddenly Joey switches up his style, slipping into something I can only compare to Lil Uzi’s 2016 XXL cypher performance. Why would you put that on your album? The production on this album isn’t even bad, a lot of it is experimental with techno and trap inspiration and the kind of beats that Vince Staples would destroy but, as it turns out, Joey would actually just ruin.   

I can’t express just how disappointing the rest of the album is, it almost must be heard to be believed. Most bizarrely of all, the album is rounded off with a spoken word poem from GZA of Wu-Tang as if he is tying together a grand arc across the project. I’m not sure why he’s there. It’s a nice poem GZA. But why? It doesn’t even fit the tone of the album; how can we go from from Joey demanding: ‘damn look at my wrist dog, damn look at my bitch dog’ in one moment, to having GZA talking about the early morning squirrels and birds in the next. The album is inconsistent and at times incoherent. It believes it is much grander than it is. It wastes some really promising production and I’m still here annoyed, six months later.

If I have missed something big and elaborate about this album I’d love to know, but I have given it many chances and there is just not much there.

2.5/10