This afternoon, recovering from a fever, I decided to finally tune in to Brendan Ortiz's latest internet release, "The Pre-Tape." Here's a guy who asks for 200 Facebook likes before a release and gets more. And there is truth in popular belief: dude has bars.
The tape starts with "Motivation," a low-key intro rapped in Ortiz's low sing-song vocals over a slower version of a standard industry beat. By starting with "It was all a dream, but I made it a reality,"Ortiz sets the tone for one of the more thoughtful tracks in his latest 7-song arsenal. It's not that he doesn't revert to his ongoing banter about money, sex, basketball and getting faded. It's just that the images he conjures up about posters of his idols in his high school locker, telling his friends he's about to "make it,"and handing out mixtapes at the gas station make us feel like we're listening to a person rather than a persona.
The entire down-to-earth attitude is washed away in "Rip the Beat Up," which is not entirely a bad thing. B doesn't want us to get bored. He kicks it off by calling his "haters" pussies and snakes and then launches into a hook where he brings back the acronym "TSM" for "Team Stillmatic," a group that has evolved from a jerk squad with a Myspace page to a rap crew that has come to represent the Madison Memorial scene. The TSM movement came into question when Ortiz and his friend Mikey Smith had a short-lived beef, which caused Ortiz to drop the diss track aptly titled "Mikey Smith." The bottom line is, the TSM roster is fairly fluid, which explains the ushering-in of Kane-O and Vell, who inhabit the second and third verses. Kane-O is more nasal than Ortiz but manages to flow better than Vell, who would rather lay back and slur his way from verse three to the reprise of "up, up, up, up"(rip it, what's, throw it, what's, in order). The three make a cohesive anthem, and this track foreshadows the expansion of the Team Stillmatic tradition.
On "She Gon' Go" Ortiz brings out the autotune, voicing played-out sexual innuendos over a slow, rhythmic beat dripping with guitars. The harmonies on the hook give it a less sparse feel than the verses, and the deep-voice at the end declaring "Sip it up, po' it out, TSM, you know what I'm about," might justify the dragging tempo for Chopped-and-Screwed lovers, but this song is a little distracting from the rest of the tape.
Then, without warning, we are transported back to the sounds of 2009. "Get it in" is almost straight jerk music, which is what Ortiz thrives in. It begins with an orgasmic female hum looped to the sound of 808 bass hits and a hollow snare. Rico, who turns out to be another Stillmatic member, raps a boastful verse until Ortiz comes in with a "I get it in" chant that serves as a hook (this is where the girl-hum drops and we're left with nothing but bass, snare, and Ortiz. You can almost feel your jeans tighten). Then a megaphone-wielding voice comes out of nowhere and announces "at the crib we get it crackiiiiin, bitches only come 'cause we attractiiiiive." After another round of gettin' it in, the girl-hum re-enters and Ortiz drops the megaphone to rap about how jealous you are of how well his clothes fit. He drops a Blake Griffin reference and proceeds to rhyme "clap" with "bad" and "we don't care" with "over here," finally landing at another hook and descending into a low-pitched coda where he poses the question "real n****s what's good?" before letting the beat ride out untouched for the last 30 seconds ending in the girl saying "I can't feel no better."
Imagine what she would say about the fifth selection off of the "Pre-Tape," "Something," where Ortiz channels his inner Usher Raymond over a down-tempo synthfest of a beat. Using a combination of pitch-correction and peaking vocals, Ortiz lays down a short, sweet love song that falls back on too many cliches. It's hard to see him try to form a smooth R&B personality when his rap alias is so raw and scrappy. Until he can sing as well as he spits, "Something" is hard to swallow.
"Two Shots" is by far my favorite. For lack of a better term, Vell goes in. Far from versatile, he sticks to a big, slow flow about Berettas and women on their knees. The lyrics are cutthroat: "She said she had no daddy so I named the bitch bastard" falls into a bed of bass-- while rapping along to it feel free to practice your mean mug. Then silence. "Its B... Yeah, uh. I remember when I used to rock skinnies in this bitch, err body tried to do it so you know I had to quit!" The rest of his verse isn't as good except the reference to controversy surrounding his age, a hot topic around State Tournament time in Madison as kids from other schools desperately searched for ways to degrade him over Twitter. At the end Kane-O steps in, ending the song a lot less hype than it started but still with a significantly tight flow.
The last song on the tape is "Miles Davis," named after the trumpet sample it exploits to create the most interesting instrumental on the tape. The first rapper fails to identify himself, but also fails to annunciate well enough to keep up with his flow. Then B takes the mic and talks about putting wack rappers in their place and attracting girls with his nerd swag. He even throws in a line about independent clauses before pronouncing the beat dead. The final words on the tape are "amen" followed by a staccato "swag."
Bottom Line: Rip the Beat Up, Get it In, and Two Shots are what keep this tape moving. B. Ortiz's attempted thoughtfulness at the beginning of the tape was quickly overshadowed by the aggressive persona we've come to know as "B." On the "Pre-Tape," Ortiz is still feeling around, flexing his mixtape muscles as much as he can before he has to decide what kind of artist he really is.
-KMC
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