“After, seein my momma cries
Motherfucker, I know I’ma rise”
With only 12 views in the last five years (including mine) I don’t think songs like “I Do It” on A Hype’s “Goin 2 War” have risen very far. If that sounds like bashing an easy target you might be right, but there’s still something worth saying about aspirational rap here. We should all have big dreams regardless of our ability to achieve them presently. If you set a goal higher than the level you are on, you’ll either strive to get to that level, or realize after a lot of hard work that you set the bar TOO HIGH and can’t get there. We don’t grow through complacency. Even a flower has to turn to face the sun. Everything alive struggles to succeed. The fear of failure is even worse than failing. It means you’ll never try, never struggle, never grow. By his own admission on “Wordsmith,” A Hype is struggling and growing in the process.
“Yeah, my mission with ambition to rap
I be struggling to survive, I had to scrap
just to press my suicidal self off the shelf
like taking my presents for granted, like an elf”
While there’s a lack of intricate wordplay from this wordsmith, there’s also an undeniably earnest sincerity to what he says that ballers and trappers lack. How many emcees would actually admit they were unsatisfied and genuinely depressed to the point of self-harm? The cynical amongst you would say that A Hype made that confession just so we’d go easy on him and not bash a sad boi. I might even be that cynical myself. It still doesn’t make me want to rub his amateur performance in his face like a dog who shit on the carpet; frankly, I wouldn’t do that to a dog either.
The first time I played “Break Thru” I saw something I had genuinely never seen when reviewing an album before — zero views on a song. The astounding part for me is that I’ve heard a lot worse rappers who have had hundreds to even thousands of views, and ones so awful they got millions in multiples. “They don’t want him to flow.” Maybe so A. Maybe there’s some kind of conspiracy to keep you down? Sike, no. This is the inevitable reality of having so much content online that at some point some of it was going to be completely undiscovered until the exact moment I played it for the first time and became the first person to hear the shit.
“Relaxing” also had the same ignominious fate here, leaving large parts of “Goin 2 War” as undiscovered country for you to explore. You might ask how something this obscure and unknown even wound up on streaming platforms. Why host it when nobody’s interested? Better question — WHY NOT? It can’t cost more than a fraction of a cent if it’s using no bandwidth and you already have infinitely large racks of server storage around the world. If this review results in A Hype actually getting some hype their investment will have paid off a thousand fold.
I need to be clear about this though. I’m not saying A Hype is a good emcee, and this clearly self-produced album has some very poor choices when it comes to mixing audio and vocals. It results in muddy lyrics and rhymes that are awkward or off beat when they didn’t need to be. A Hype has exceeded his own ability here, but in daring to dream big, I can at least admire his effort and hope he’ll achieve some part of his dreams in the future. “Goin 2 War” proves not everything you listen to has to be a masterpiece for it to have been worth doing in the first place.
A Hype :: Goin 2 War
3.5Overall Score