The writeup for Store Run sounds like it was written by Kanye
I’ve seen praise for Hit-Boy’s beats the moment
King’s Disease II hit the Interweb – the fukk were these people
listening to? Because what I’m hearing are faulty attempts at updating the boom bap aesthetic, a sound that Hit-Boy doesn’t seem to be very good at even emulating, much less improving upon, with exhibit A being the instrumental for “Store Run”, which plays like his machine fukked up the soul sound bite he was trying to sample throughout the beat but he decided to run with it anyway because the barbecue joint across town opened in an hour and he needed to be there as soon as the doors were unlocked to get their peach cobbler, which typically sells out within minutes. There’s so little care put into the treatment of this beat, up to and including pairing it with what sounds like the first drum beat he found on his hard drive, that it kind of makes sense to me now why Kanye would kick him off of the G.O.O.D. Music production squad. (I realize that
isn’t why he was removed from Ye’s squad, but you must agree that there is no way a perfectionist such as Jesus Kanye Christ would ever allow something such as “Store Run” to leave the studio.) In turn, Nas’s grizzled veteran sounds exhausted and indifferent, his shyt-talk and awfully unsympathetic advice falling on deaf ears because nobody will ever want to listen to this crap ever again. I’m hoping I’m wrong and that Hit-Boy’s beats become staggeringly better from this point forward, because at this moment I’m imagining a scenario where, like the first
King’s Disease, I never feel the need to listen to this project again, except this time it’ll be because the music genuinely
sucks.
