Swollen Members f/ Ghostface Killah: "Weight"

Trust me, there was a time when the Swollen Members seemed fresh. They rocked a crowd of 13,000 drunk kids at my University’s year-end festival in 2001, and then proceeded to destroy the headline act’s on-stage equipment at the urging of the crowd. They promptly got shut down by security, but it was a pretty significant “fuck you, we’re here” at the time. Now, five years later, internationally niche-marketed as Canadian rock stars, and therefore internationally-ignored, Swollen Members have turned into a tepid, vain and boring caricature of what they hinted at becoming.

See "Weight," from the forthcoming Black Magic (September 12th), produced by the Alchemist, featuring one of the world's best emcees, and essentially a piss-poor parody of anything from Fishscale.

The beat is an incoherent jumble of baroque keyboard samples and stock drums, Ghost’s verse is also old warehouse seconds, uninspired raps of standard-fare blowjobs, guns and jewels, and he sounds preoccupied that Swollen’s cheque for the guest drop is going to bounce. Which the track doesn’t: the Members do nothing to save themselves. Mad Child offers third-rung thuggery, Prevail gives us a detailed and mind-numbingly account of how music is made and produced. The whole thing amounts to a PG-13 Junior High field trip to the set of Hustle and Flow, before that soundtrack was compiled.

Unsurprisingly, the hook notes "swolled up" pockets and money folders. Beyond disappointing: it seems like Mad Child, after abandoning his Dungeons and Dragons rap, has decided that SM should be its own punchline.