On top of being unfunny, his lyrics lack detail, a sense of place or geography, or a definite personality to bolster him when he starts telling stories. Try as he might, empty lines like “Complex like the magazine” from “People Change” don’t have the same mileage.Īs a comic rapper, Hodgy’s bars are stale and basic. Rappers have built entire aesthetics around selling punchlines- Roc Marciano and Pi’erre Bourne are pros at this-but theirs are attached to stories, a distinct worldview that doubles as a glimpse at their personality. While Hodgy switches between both modes with technical flair, bars like “Every day I’m on my grind like a skateboarder/I’m a g, I’m on my rind like a shaved orange” from opener “Everyday” are dead on arrival. That lack of focus is ironic considering the track titles spell out a declarative sentence: “Every day, people change into someone we never knew again.” Whether this is some sort of meta-commentary or just a whoa, dude weedism, the thinness of his lyrics don’t do his singing or rapping any favors.
It is a tighter and more focused experience than Fireplace, but only by virtue of it being five songs long instead of 13. This remains the problem on his latest EP Entitled, which shows he’s still a decent performer without telling us why we should care. For all the gusto of his marathon-like flow on “Final Hour” or his ballooning voice on “Resurrection,” it felt like anyone could’ve written most of these songs. After a number of mixtapes, he released his 2016 “debut” Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide, which featured bursts of strong rapping and singing tied to indistinct writing. But as he moved on to solo work, his abilities began to wane.
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