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Why L’Roneous’s Imaginarium isn’t a classic album?
(more to come in the details since Y!A does this character limit **** these days)
Imaginarium was released in 1998, in the tail end of hip hop’s “Golden Age”. It has a love affair with the acoustic bass and bass guitar, using them to supplement usually fast-paced, snare-oriented and high-hat-generous back-beats to great effect. Tracks are sprinkled couthfully with vocal samples, alluding to the track’s content with impactful or pithy sayings. The production is artfully fit together to sell another 90’s soulful gem.
L’Roneous comes through with clustered syllables, cramming as many words into each line as possible and decorating them with scientific buzzwords. He’s got an idiosyncratic metaphor for every single whack rapper out there and then some, and manages to fit his slightly off-beat flow to every single sample on the album. There’s practically no repetition and it feels as if he’s got a general scientific encyclopedia he checked out from a library on a stand next to him while he’s rapping. His voice is mildly pleasing and his tongue seems to be slightly behind at the end of every word which ends up making his words mesh together in a not-unpleasing quirky manner. If there’s one thing that can be said about L’Roneous, he isn’t a slouch. He can rap.
Although L’Roneous checks every box in the technical area, Imaginarium ends up lacking in substance. Da Versifier presents himself as an erudite representative for dope rap of previous times, backing up his credentials with his impressive vocabulary. What he lacks, is a sense that he was an insider in the aspect of hip hop that was in its last years in the time of Imaginarium’s release.
He constantly bashes fakers and talks about his process for concocting fresh rhymes, but when he goes over serious concepts (between 5-6 tracks of bashing all the whack rappers), the narratives are broken on bloated verses and slightly misused words.
Reaction rate escapes the, scopes of isotopes, called
Yes yes y'all, so pipe you toke, all dank smoke provokes
The musical, whimsical, chemical, quantum lyrical
Stylist, compiling, reply to the stimuli
Exemplified by the amplified phenomena
Deep like operas, completing thoughts to the, finish in this
I'm about to dent a sentence with the emphasis on sentiments
(Which sentiments are emphasized, exactly?)
They come across as idealistic, removed, lacking the personal or bohemian qualities that the early giants such as Nas or O.C. had in discussing heavy issues. L’Roneous is guilty of the same kind of action that causes hip hop heads to dismiss rappers such as Canibus or Hopsin, reporting authority while ignorance is evident. Frankly, this shouldn’t surprise since L’Roneous seems to have a fetish for combining weakly related STEM terms in his verses.
Unfortunately, the stream of consciousness style he employs requires originality and, above all, soul. There needs to be an overarching narrative of himself that he paints, beyond ‘skill’. “Style”.
L’Roneous’s ignorance is comparatively subtle, even though he claims a lot of authority. Beyond this central foible, the album is braced by its flawless production and L’Roneous’s dependable technique, so it comes out a strong effort. But it ends up being slightly uncertain when put under a looking glass, and not feeling perfectly suitable when fit to any particular sub-genre of hip hop.
Imaginarium is an nineties kid with the sagged jeans and the ice, and the sneakers and bars, but ended up not skipping the doo-rag for favor of a red hunting hat.
3 Answers
- 5 years ago
oh this muh fu*cka.....where you been? I'mma get right back on this...i got a few patients here i gotta handle...
Wow...i forgot about the question.....
But since i'm here....
The funny thing about dude is yeah this guy is dope...the production is very nice and timeless....But he just wins the Canibus award in my opinion....which means he's pretentious as hell for nothing....
Another funny thing i was going to say was in reference to the Canibus award was that i was going to cite "L'Chemy" as an example....then i read your updates....yeeeeah you know what it is...."Manifesto" is another one i felt strained hearing at a point for the same reasoning....maybe more so than "L'Chemy"....actually hell yeah its worst in my opinion.lol...."In The C.O.R.N." is another one that fits the bill.....
oh....apparently you already mentioned Canibus in your update....i really shouldn't have started typing before i read it all...lol....
You said a lot...honestly its a great piece of logic in regards to his style and what it ultimately embodies in regards to Hip Hop and perceptions within that type of sound and fan base....
However...i'm not sure about the demoting of the album itself....while i can agree to practically every f*cking thing you said....the music is still rather solid...i mean its nice sh*t once you get beyond the "Spectacular Vernacular lyrical spiritual metaphysical" type of sh*t he definitely embodies throughout the album...the thing is i don't think its too overbearing because he has other elements in the music that make the overall sound pleasant and not to overbearing...
do i think this is a case of over analyzing?....a little....but it makes total sense....i'm just not sure if his style of lyricism and such is enough to really deter the overall sound of the music....Such as Canibus....who couldn't make a song pop if it adopted him....
bottom line....if someone were to say this was a classic....i can't blame them....and usually i'd be waiting to sh*t on people like this...but i don't think i really can because the music is quite nice...on some Tony Hawk Underground 2 soundtrack sh*t....
i mean you said it yourself....he can rap....i can understand the substance part because you don't really get much out of who he really is....he sounds too generic for a 98-99 release....and the production isn't as trippy as Company Flow even though they have a comparable style...outside of the obvious punch line stylings Company flow got....which is why i would choose that over L’Roneous....
- 5 years ago
Great review brotha, but this is one of the few high vocabulary scientific type of albums I actually like.
The delivery is very imaginative lol, I have no idea why. ITS JUST ME NO ONE ELSE! But L'Roneous reminds me of Papoose at times...
Though the album really is a classic... I believe it is one of the most heavily underrated albums of all time... L'Roneous is very underrated...
- Richard BLv 75 years ago
If only rappers could be more like Holden Caulfield...
But seriously, nice review. I agree with your take on the style versus substance thing and how you basically exposed that verse as the gibberish that it is.
