French Montana - Jungle Rules

French Montana
Jungle Rules
2017
Spotify

Perhaps my favorite, and maybe my only favorite, thing about the lead up to this album was an aggressive social media fight between Blac Chyna and Rob Kardashian. Within the really quite sick fight between two disturbed individuals, French Montana slide into the comments and promoted this album. Savagery and flamboyance at it's finest, the same way Montana has built his career. He is a professional at being around the most famous people, making sure his flossing and bombastic lifestyle is front and center. Yet his music is simply put, garbage. The lifestyle he lives should lead to deep revelations, interesting takes or at least great stories but none of that makes it's way on to his records, instead He is content with basic beats and basic ass rhymes. The production is not all that bad and French does allow his many features to takeover for the most part, but it's still French Montana and it's still not that good. His delivery is like someone imitating rap, always has been, and when you pair that with emotionally devoid storytelling who is left around to care? Somehow though French manages to stay in the zeitgeist, a delayed album here, a Kardashian relationship there so on and so on just hanging on for dear life. On "Unforgettable" French is almost non-existent, and instead it becomes more of R&B jam for Swae Lee. Similar to DJ Khalid's record this year, you really can imagine how much better this record would be if French wasn't there at all.

"Trippin" is so incredibly repetitive that the very few words French says make almost no impact. His word choice on this song is also so odd, leading to more confusion. "A Lie" which features the Weeknd is really atrocious and instead of taking advantage of the Weeknd's dark brooding style the song is to bright and to thin. It really is quite incredible that this album of 18 tracks can say almost nothing. It's just a gilded bunch of bullshit, basically telling his listeners "look who i got on this record" rather than look what I can do with this record. It just feels like throughout French needs you to know how rich he is, how many friends he has and how famous they are something He has spent his entire career trying to convince everyone of. "Hotel Bathroom" spends almost the first full minute yelling things that are in a hotel "Hotel bathroom!" "Hotel Couch!" which is fucking insane and ends with this sort of Monastic chant that just makes no sense at all. "Bring Dem Things" is so close to being a throwback classic fronted by Pharrell, but it is missing something extra to really set it off, like a better rapper. I could probably drill down and really dissect everything going on with this record, but it's too long and too bad to list. French Montana however still has managed to hang around despite his talent so who knows, maybe I'm wrong and every song will make up the top 18 for years, but I highly... HIGHLY doubt it.

3.1 out of 10