Just Bass, the Album
In this article, Peter sits in his puddle of tears, while relistening to Trippie Redd's disappointing album, Mansion Musik.
Trippie Redd’s Magnum Opus of Sadness, Anguish, Grief, Heartache, Heartbreak, Hopelessness, Misery, Melancholy, Mourning, Poignancy, Sorrow, Blahs and Bleakness
By Peter Easterwood
Michael Lamar White VI, also known as Trippie Redd, is a rapper from Canton, Ohio. He arrived on the scene, releasing multiple tracks on a website called SoundCloud. Many notable rappers came out of the Soundcloud “era”, that ran the late 2010s. With Trippie Redd came Juice Wrld, XXXTentacion, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. Redd gained traction when he released the song “Love Scars”, using a trap influenced beat, but melodically singing over it, instead of just rapping over it. He, X, and Juice pushed the agenda of that style of rap to the point where a bunch of unknown rappers trying to grow copied that style.
After releasing “Love Scars”, Redd released his first mixtape, A Love Letter to You. The tape showed the listener the mix of singing and rapping Redd was capable of doing, but the singing is bleh at best, and the rapping not really adding much to his image. The highlights of the album would be his love-based songs, where he doesn’t constantly flex his money, drugs, and women he gets, and focuses more on the feelings he has to this unkown woman. The issue is that it is bare bones in the rapping department, has uninteresting flow, and, again, has uninteresting lyrics. All that is definitely put front stage with the weird mixing. In some songs, his voice seems to just “overshadow” the beat. He later released one more mixtape: A Love Letter to You 2 (also inconsistent), until he finally released his first studio album, Life’s a Trip.
Arguably his best album he has released, Life’s a Trip finally shows growth in his lyricism, singing, and production. The greatest example of all of these would be on the song “Dark Knight Dummo”, which features the most uncontroversial artist of all time, Travis Scott. Controversies aside, Redd’s screams in the background throughout the song can hype the listener, and the bass hits hard, but doesn’t fog out the lyrics. Scott, of course, comes in with a great feature. He floats through the song, with his iconic “Yeah” spread all over his verse. The main rap songs, like “UKA UKA”, show Redd experimenting with a different voice, but lose their energy the longer the tracks go, with very annoying hooks. He redeems himself with the song “Shake It Up”, just talking about a girl shaking her uh, ya. Either way, the song just flows perfectly. Even with a cheesy theme, the beat and his deepened voice just work well together. After Life’s a Trip, he released another somewhat consistent studio album, the third of his A Love Letter to You series.
The album focuses more on a poppier sound, opening with “Topanga”, sampling a Gospel song by Maurette Brown Clark, “It Ain’t Over.” A Love Letter to You 3 is the brightest out of the prior two, and way more experimental. When Redd experiments, he seems to hit the idea on the head. “Topanga” is proof of his experimental success. On the other hand, when he tries to rap on a more basic beat, he does poorly, not having the ability to carry the beat, and just rambles on and on. “A.L.L.T.Y. 3” is the definition of abhorrent, especially the feature by Baby Goth. Redd’s flow is awkward, and the rhymes are lazily put together, with Goth following the same idea, but her voice is, to put it vaguely, annoying, as well as the rhymes (she only rhymes off of the word “pinky”). A Love Letter to You 3 shines when Redd gets a hard hitting, fast-paced beat, and then cracks when he brings a bland, soft sounding beat, where his lyrics are shown front stage. He does not try to fix that issue, and enhances it with his next album: !.
! is the biggest showing of Redd’s inconsistencies of being a lyricist, with the self-titled song !, where he constantly says the same thing over and over again. The lyrics from a digital media and music website, Genius, proves the point. On both of his verses, Redd repeats: “Damn, that sh** hurt, bae. That sh** hurt in the worst way.” On mostly every song, he repeats the same lyrics over and over again. The worst part of it is the meaning of the album’s name– a sweet tribute to his recently deceased friend XXXTentacion (who released an album ? prior to his sudden death). The tribute was ruined by poor, lazy writing. Showing no growth as an artist since Life’s a Trip, Redd had to finally show a big jump lyrically, and A Love Letter to You 4 is gonna be that. Right?
Heck no. Though the album is much more consistent, he continues to follow his old route, inconsistent rapping, and poor delivery in multiple songs. Let’s not forget the features from multiple artists that flop on their face. The best example of this failure is the song This Ain’t That, featuring another uncontroversial artist, Lil Mosey. Funnily enough, Redd keeps up with the song instead of a bland beat, he uses a guitar based beat, with hard hitting bass throughout it, but the feature is something else. Lil Mosey is a caricature of a rapper. Think of what your parents think rappers sound like; that’s him. He lazily talks with slurred speech about all the cars he has, guns, and women. It is quite the verse. A Love Letter to You 4 is just another Redd album, full of notable hits, but brought down with the same amount of misses. He can follow this route and still be an interesting artist, but with ! he has shown that when he gets lazy with writing. The album turns into a massive dumpster fire; that is where Pegasus comes in.
Fans have appreciated Redd’s appealing vocals, and trap-oriented beats, but Pegasus loses both, and adds horrific writing on the side, too. The album came with an astounding amount of negative reviews, especially on the website Album of the Year (AOTY), which allows both regular people, and professional reviewers to share their opinions together. In this case, the regular Redd fan showed out in the worst way possible for Redd. The average user score for Pegasus was a very positive 31 out of 100, this coming from 552 users. The album (again) is defined by one word: inconsistent. However, to the extent of fillers in this album, Redd should have just thrown the album away. Instead, he released the side B of the album, Neon Shark vs Pegasus– a weird switch in sound, where he experimented with punk rock. Unfortunately, the execution is so poor that it should have been thrown away the first Pegasus, not to mention Travis Barker helped produce the album.
Three albums out of four released have flopped, and hurt the view of Redd as an alright rapper– inconsistent at best. He knew he had to regain that type of respect with his next album, but he instead produced the most unoriginal album he has ever released, Trip at Knight. Before the release of Trip at Knight, Playboi Carti (a close friend of Redd), released Whole Lotta Red– Carti’s most experimental album. It shows a whole different side of Carti, focusing on using synths and bass, with a high-pitched baby-esque voice to rap. Supposedly, it inspired Redd to practically steal the idea, and release Trip at Knight, an album full of Carti sounding beats, but since it is not from Carti himself, it comes off as unoriginal. The issue with Trip at Knight is that the sound is never changed, so the songs combine into one, making the album’s experience feel like a drag.
After the release of Trip at Knight, he began the “treacherous” journey of copy and pasting for his next album. Mansion Musik was hyped up again, especially after one specific post Redd made. Prior to the drop of Mansion Musik, he constantly posted on his Instagram story going under the hashtag MM, an acronym for Mansion Musik. One day, Redd decided to hype one single song that would appear on the album called “Krzy Train”, which featured Travis Scott (still the most uncontroversial artist of all time). The story had a photo of the song title and album cover, with a caption underneath it calling it “Dark Knight Dummo Pt. 2”. Obviously, with that title, the song would be one of the most hyped up songs off the album. Unfortunately, that song, and the whole album itself, proved to be another sad, underbaked, carbon copy of Trip at Knight.
The album opens with the song “Mansion Musik”, which pretty much presents the theme that the album would follow: bass filled beat, autotuned Trippie, and very corny lyrics. The beats are a definite change from Trip at Knight, more grimy-sounding, and more trap based, but nevertheless, Redd keeps that sound for the entire album, just like Trip at Knight. The same issue occurs on Mansion Musik, where Redd does not learn that changing the sound to make each song interesting can help any listener stay captivated, instead of falling asleep. Additionally, the mixing is probably the weirdest any listener could here. There are certain parts where it gets awkward sounding. For example, in “Krzy Train”, Scott’s feature is the most awkward moment on the whole album. The whole song has Redd go through multiple emotional swings, where he goes from flexing to saying he loves this girl. Then, Scott enters the song, and the beat, for some reason, fades behind him. His autotuned voice is just the main focus of the song. The disappointment Redd’s Mansion Musik gives off is other worldly, going from anemo-rapper/singer to a Playboi Carti copy is just sad to witness.
His career started out bright, and it almost seemed like he was destined to make a big splash in the music scene, especially rap. Sadly, with X and Juice Wrld passing, the soundcloud era flamed out rather quickly. Even after both of them passing, Redd carried the emo rap genre for a while, but never built on the glaring issues he had as a writer. The more albums he released, the more the laziness appeared, especially after !. After multiple flops, Mansion Musik showed that Redd will make no effort into perfecting his craft, and instead, copy the popular Playboi Carti sound that is now everywhere in the rap scene. With that being said, Mansion Musik gets a very generous 1.8/10, as it is just an album full of disappointment and sadness.
