CD Review: Kottonmouth Kings – Hidden Stash 420
November 5th, 2009 Filed under: Reviews - Music by admin
CD Review – Kottonmouth Kings
Hidden Stash 420
Suburban Noize Records
One thought comes to mind upon listening to the first few songs of Kottonmouth Kings’ new monster 40-song double album Hidden Stash 420 and never leaves through the entire thing: “Man, this totally blows.” Rapping over beats that sound like they were stolen out of a bin marked “too shitty to use” in Timbaland’s basement, Kottonmouth Kings hit you with every rap cliché in the book and expect you to act like you’ve never encountered them before. Rapping on subjects like smoking weed, sex, smoking weed, pimpin’, smoking weed, partying, and every single other hip-hop-ism you can think of, Kottonmouth Kings display just how little they seem to have been paying attention to mainstream media for the last ten years as they reach into their lyrical bag of tricks and come up with the same rhymes that artists like 50 Cent and Nelly have been slanging for a decade.
While their abundance of relatively uplifting raps is to be commended (if you like that kind of thing) just because it’s different from most other hip-hop out there today, one could just as easily listen to someone like K-OS or K’naan for a taste of rapping that is not only more upbeat but is more original, more fun to listen to, and doesn’t come with the prerequisite bullshit thugishness and brain-raping Auto-Tune. The only real highlights on disc one are the last track, the upbeat “Let The Music Play”, Tech N9ne phoning in his verse on “Sacrifice”, and a 6-second sample of an interview with Rosebudd(“two d’s for a double-dose of this pimpin’!”) from the Hughes Brothers’ legendary documentary masterpiece American Pimp on the track “Stoner Bitch”.
Disc two features nearly identical crap as the songs all blend together like the bodily fluids of a prison inmate getting ready to get a bit of revenge on an abusive guard. It’s all just more of the same, more rhymes about weed, more girlish R&B singers butting in inappropriately with their electrically-enhanced vocals, more beats that sound like they were mass produced by sweaty old ladies in a Chinese labour camp. If you’re already a big Kottonmouth Kings fan then you will no doubt absolutely love this album but for the rest of the brain-having public, a polite headshake and a quiet “dumbass” under one’s breath should suffice when asked if you’d like to have a listen.
By A.W. Reid
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