In 2011, everybody is a weed rapper. Wiz Khalifa is blowing up the pop charts with his fluffy take on hip-hop, Curren$y is storming the underground with his inventive wordplay and esoteric sensibilities, and Devin the Dude has been spinning his novel, everyman stoner tales for years. So if there are any wannabe rap stars out there who are gunning for the high honor of the stoner-hop throne, they’d better bring serious style, charisma, and technical skill, as well as something that can separate them from the pack. Great People gets it half-right with “Patchouli”, the group’s workmanlike second mixtape that fails to be what all hippy-hop should: dope.
A team-up between Henry Daher, Nikolai Paiva, Riley Barnes, and norman Lamberty, Great People are an Orlando-based collective with a knack for ethereal, psychadelic pianos and bustling live drums. Norman Lamberty is their primary rapper, and to his credit, he raps without adopting some cornball nickname. They attracted some attention a while ago when “Orange U High?” topped the Hype Machine charts, and deservedly too.
“Orange U High?” is the mixtape’s standout and lead-off song, featuring organ hits that sound like a sunrise, blunted-out cooing on the chorus, and the line “Hell yeah I grow pot/I’m not a robot.” “Orange U High?” is devoid of substance or any real life insights, but that’s not the song’s job. The goal here is to have a fun song to vibe out and smoke something to, and the track certainly accomplishes that. Lamberty is at his lyrical prime here, spitting grandiose boasts like “This is A Clockwork Orange/smoke some pot first, write a hot verse/my planet is not earth/Pluto is my home”.
Unfortunately, none of the other songs reach the same levels of coy wordplay. On “Patchouli”, reversed crash cymbals and hi-hats that sound like a cricket chirping don’t make up for one of the laziest flows ever put to Pro Tools. When “You wanna be a G but you’re an A-hole” is used as a 16-ending punchline, you know you’re getting sloppy. The second best chorus on the album, a hypnotic chant of “It’s just me, and my smoke, and my raw papers” barely saves “Patchouli” from the rubbish bin. “If” features an unnecessary guest appearance from somebody named “TWO”. Although this rapper holds his own by creating some interesting stoner word play with “Webelos” (pronounced We-Blow) the beat on this track is a shapeless much, drums that don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing and woozy, whining synth sounds that sound like something even Tyler, The Creator would have trashed as too murky and boring.
“Free People” picks up the slack with a spacey, HD synth arpeggio that seems to sparkle like gold and lo-fi drums that contrast remarkably. It’s too bad that connect-the-dot punchlines about “getting paper like Dunder-Mifflin” drag it down. Lamberty manages to briefly get it right again on lazy-sunday piano floater “Images”, shouting out weed that he calls Manu Chao and playing with internal rhyme schemes to his best effect yet, closest to the blissed-out “Orange You HIgh?” that he offers, but you still get the sense that he could have accomplished so much more if he just put a little more effort in.
The tape closes out with “Televised”, a track that originally belonged to Curren$y. Curren$y’s flow, almost like he’s not trying, but still incredibly proficient, gives his deft wordplay even more power. He doesn’t stick to punchlines though, offering brief anecdotes interspersed with bragging: “A couple niggas from my old block mad/so when I visit, I park my lo-lo in the grass/to keep an eye out, smoking one for the homie on the mural/ as I ride past, if I was drinking, I would have poured some wine out/knockin’ Frank, Amy Winehouse”. What you get here is a picture of Curren$y’s life. Through these little details, like how he parks to avoid jealous frenemies, or how he shouts out Amy Winehouse’s lesser-known album, paint a picture of a man who is wise, wary, and dedicated to dope.
What do we get from Great People on this track? “If you could twist it like a straw hat/you wanna be a connoisseur, then get the raw pack/I’m what you call rap/step to me like a ladder, boy, I’m on a different level, you should fall back”. So, he’s really cool and he likes raw papers. Get in line. The contrast between the two rappers is subtle on the surface, yet vividly apparent when you deconstruct their bars like this. Great People need to figure out what they want to rap about, and fast. It’s cool to simply spit about weed, but you gotta do it with some more panache if you wanna keep opening for Big Sean, or even better, have Sean open for you. That’s not to say this is a worthless album; the three or four keeper tracks on this free tape are worth having the filler on your hard drive. My point still stands, though- for artists who claim to be smoking the finest skunk, their album is certainly filled with a lot of shwag.
