Salient

Tourettes - Gimme $5 and I’ll Show You My Dick

By Sophie Barclay | 10 Sep, 2007

With an album title like this and an MC name like Tourettes, I can honestly say I was expecting something slightly more amusing than awful rhymes, spoken ‘poetry’, and rants about drugs and alcohol.

Generally, it’s pretty uninspiring hip hop and his songs are quite boring as they lack structure and variance. He has a wide variety of topics: myspace, alcohol, drugs, text, sex, alcohol, jail (as if he’s ever been), girls that are “special” to him, and hypochondriacs.

Track 6 is Ying Yang Twins-y, in the sense that it is whispered for about the first 35 seconds. Then the song takes a turn for the worse when he starts a-rappin’, descending into self-deprecation, including how he writes “nonsense, pretending that my poems are deep” (agreed).

However, this album is not just straight hip hop, for example, the track ‘Holiday’ starts off like a punk/hardcore track, heading into rapped verses with lyrical ‘gems’ such as “he wants a holiday, but where’s the first stop, there’s Mcdonalds and Subway on every single block, across the globe”.

Some of the backing beats are cool, like track 16, which has a jazz/soul “vibe”, and ‘Hypochondriac’ with its funky backbeat. Most of these songs are ruined by repetitive scratching of boring samples, such as Aids and Blood.

Pretty disappointing really, although in his spoken freestyle “underground” he has some semi-political, quite amusing points he makes about modern day rappers, such as “if you’re so good at fighting, box, if you got skills, battle, and if you’re god’s gift to women then why you going home alone when your show’s finished”, and ‘conscious’ hip hop “as if there is anything remotely conscious about signing to major labels and endorsing shoes”. He ruins this song with lyrics such as “let’s get beers and a movie, stare at the tree, get boozed, turn up the music”. Plus his underground ‘gangsta’ image is slightly tainted by his speech impediment where his Rs become Ws. Not really a great look for a wapper, is it?

Before I completely write this off, although I was disappointed with 99.9999 recurring % of this album, track 14 is a hidden gem. It’s the random indie/country track with melodic, slightly melancholic, singing, and not a hint of hip hop. Best track on the album, definitely.

If I had tourettes I could probably say what I really thought of this album without even trying. Although as Tourettes himself says “I’ve come to a conclusion that the best things in life just weren’t meant for public consumption” (Underground).

Still, I wouldn’t even pay $1.