2000

Joey Bada$$

Brooklyn’s Joey Bada$$ did what few have ever done at the turn of the last decade: he gained major cultural and critical acclaim as a supremely talented throwback artist while he was still in his teens. His mixtape, 1999, captured a boom bap nostalgia that sounded particularly fresher than most attempts in the last 15 or so years. Joey’s discography since then seems to have missed a step between “teen prodigy mastering an old sound” and “legacy artist trying to re-catch lightning in a bottle.” The steady climb never really happened for Joey, and that’s a damn shame because we had every reason to believe it would. The follow-up to the

1999 mixtape sounds somewhat rinsed through an A&R’s sink (opening the album with a Diddy feature should have given it away), and this album just doesn’t hit, even with Statik Selektah’s beats sounding immaculate for the most part. It calls into question whether getting major labels involved for an artist that owed so much of his style to the east coast hip-hop underground could ever work.