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TFredo’s second album in the space of six months begins in astonishing style. There is a reading of an excerpt from an 1852 speech given by former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass – a speech that pitted the celebration of “freedom” on July 4 with the plight of the slave – followed of a church-sounding organ playing a figure clearly reminiscent of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. “I know the labels don’t want it to end like this,” the rapper suggests on the chorus, “but I had to tell them it was independence day.”
This is the kind of bullish statement of freedom an artist might make if they had recently left or abandoned a major record company: a fresh start, free from interference from A&R men and bean counters you. suggesting to work around your limits and demanding to know where the next move is. But the advance Independence Day stream arrives from Sony, bearing the RCA logo, which released all of Fredo’s previous albums.
So it is clearly not that. Perhaps it has to do with the events of the last 12 months of Fredo’s career: 2020 has been a sticky creative patch for an artist who had previously scored two Top 5 albums and a string of hit singles, including the collaboration. topped the charts with Dave, Funky Friday. The problem was the only Hickory Dickory Dock. It wasn’t entirely clear if his chorus “rock it, rock it, mosh pit, mosh pit” was Fredo trying to find something designed to be memorable on TikTok, along the lines of Drake’s Toosie Slide, but whatever his intention, he received a very icy and critical reception – “what the hell is this shit?” demanded a vlog reaction – and commercially. The track disappeared from streaming services, Fredo denied it – rejecting it, along with the hits he released in 2020 with Mist and Young T & Bugsey, as “pop shit.” Tellingly, his next single was called Back to Basics.
His next album, Money Can’t Buy Happiness, was a well-received success, but it’s clear that the stigma he endured persists (“They say I fell,” he complains on Freestyle, ” they man, there are haters “), as was the suggestion that he leaned into a more commercial sound at the behest of his label, hence, presumably, the opening of Independence Day.
The rest of the album feels even more austere than its predecessor, a doubling of core values. There’s certainly nothing here like Do You Right’s heavy Auto-Tune vocals, or the Fugees-sampling Ready. What comes closest to the latter’s soulful chorus are the disembodied vocal samples that float around Skinny N **** s, a track on which Fredo undertakes to tone down a little the bluster about its richness: these sparkling chains… I have to go hard ”. Much of it deals with dark-hued samples – chimes from horror movies on Mind, a dark piano on My Mother’s Life – to trap beats and wobbly bass. This does not mean that the production is not creative. If you want your music to shake things up on TikTok, the ghostly reuse of Double Tap from a Hayloft voice by Mother Mother – a minor Canadian indie band to a selection of tracks from their 2008 album O My Heart, Hayloft among them, inexplicably became linked to trends on the video-sharing platform last year – seems a significantly better way to go: the vocals hypnotically repeat over a bubbling bassline for an exciting effect.
Lyrically, Independence Day sticks to the basics of road-rap: violence, prison, drugs, the tone of rhymes – “how you drills when you’ve only stabbed them?” ? – undermined by the melancholy that runs through the sound. Fredo doesn’t really care what kind of in-depth self-examination Dave engages in, or explicit political politics, although both Skinny N **** s and the Final Outro find him struggling to reconcile his success with his past, and his friends still trapped by poverty and crime. Wandsworth’s title in Bullingdon refers to Oxfordshire Prison, rather than Boris Johnson’s former consumer society, but Fredo is very good at showing wit amid threats of violence and contempt: ” I had more songs than Tropicana ”.
He is also good at knowing how to suddenly lower the lyric temperature, like the 14, which goes from rejecting the idea of doing a nine to a five rather than dealing in drugs, before changing your tone: “I was 14 years old. when I stopped shopping. with my mother / She said “Why? I said ‘I have beef’, she says ‘What have you done?’ The chorus launches, suddenly sounding not proud, but lost.
Elsewhere on the same track, Fredo offers another rejection of the music he made in 2020: “Last year I came into the light, this year is my heavy flow,” he says, which confirms Independence Day. It’s not one of British rap’s recurring albums, but it’s clearly not meant to be – as it gets cut off, it does its job perfectly.
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