Z ro new album 2017
Instead, he makes his reasoning pretty clear: He’s sick of us bitches, and he wants us out of his life. I don’t think encroaching age is one of the reasons he’s supposedly retiring. There’s a throwaway line on the outro to the last song about “my-pants-too-tight-ass music,” but Z-Ro’s not even delivering it as himself he’s playing one of the fans who want him to come back. Pettiness is probably more of a crucial part of Z-Ro’s art than it is for any other great rapper, and, just as he’s always done, he makes it sound almost profound on No Love Boulevard.
He really means everything he sings, and that makes the album both less and more depressing.
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But Z-Ro’s got that rich, resonant voice, and he knows how to make anything sound good. It’s a hopeless bitch-session of an album, and it would sound small and petty coming from anyone else. He has no friends: “Mean case of road rage in a nice ride / Rolling with my bestie, don’t have nobody on my right side.” He would like all the women in his life to kindly understand that he will be just fine if they disappear forever: “You say you want it, but you ain’t doing it right / You must be trippin’ if you think if you think Z-Ro need you in his life.” He is especially pissed off about gossip in all its forms: “When your ratchet-ass friends say something about me, you act just like God said it.” And he’s paying attention to all the people who say his music is too dark: “They say Ro ain’t the best, he is just depressed / He ain’t got it all, he is just a mess.” He has, after all, made hundreds of songs about how he will not give you any fucking money. You’d think that by now people would’ve stopped asking Ro for money. Most of the time, he’s surrounded by parasites demanding to know what they can get from him. To hear Z-Ro tell it, he’s never met a genuine person, a person with his best interests in mind, except maybe his daughters. (He’s been threatening to release an R&B album forever, and it breaks my heart to think that it might not happen.) And this time, he’s devoted himself almost entirely to detailing exactly what is wrong with all you bitches. When he’s singing, he’s really singing, belting out his own hooks with teeth-gritting intensity. Z-Ro can rap in a brisk triple-time, but his best moments are when he’s singing.
If anything, it’s somehow even more pure in its focus. Even with its relatively workmanlike beats, the new No Love Boulevard still sounds like a classic Z-Ro album. The beats don’t have the syrupy, bluesy warmth that they once did, but it’s crazy just how consistent Z-Ro has been over the years. On his new album, Z-Ro raps, “They say you and Trae Tha Truth need to squash the beef and get back to work / But I been hated so much, I don’t even see how that could work.”įor years, though, Z-Ro has been on his own, releasing stuff on his own label rather than Rap-A-Lot. And that didn’t even last the two have some sort of obscure long-running feud with each other now. For a long time, it seemed like these two only trusted each other. Together, the two of them recorded fuck-everybody-else anthems like “No Help,” with its lyrics about wanting everyone else to leave them alone. Eventually, he and another Guerrilla Maab member, his cousin Trae, split off and formed ABN, which stood for Assholes By Nature. (Z-Ro has said that people used to complain to Screw about him, saying that he rapped too fast, which is fun to think about.) Later, he formed the late-’90s/early-’00s group Guerrilla Maab and released three underground albums. In the late ’90s, he was part of the Screwed Up Click, one of the many Houstonians who would rap on local hero DJ Screw’s slowed-to-a-crawl mixtapes. And last week, he released No Love Boulevard, his 21st solo album - and that’s not counting all the mixtapes and EPs and collaborative albums that he’s released since his 1998 debut. And now all those other people have finally gotten to him. And his real real great subject is how other people ain’t shit. Some of Z-Ro’s biggest songs are about crooked cops or dealing drugs, but his real great subject is the sort of existential dread that comes from being unable to trust anyone else. And here’s what the owner of that voice uses it to express, over and over: “How y’all doing, but fuck all y’all / Don’t walk up on me too quick cuz I don’t trust all y’all.” That, in a nutshell, is Z-Ro, the great Houston rapper who, for decades now, has been amassing a fervent cult following by lamenting, with great depth and passion, how other people ain’t shit. It’s a beautiful voice, melodious and passionate and capable of bluesy catharsis or gospel-style uplift. The voice is a lonely foghorn, a miles-deep burned-out baritone moan that seems to radiate the wisdom of hard-earned experience.