Lil Dicky - So Hard (2013)

He knew exactly what he was doing with his rapper name and the album title. That's already a pretty good gauge on how his sense of humor is.

I'm not gonna beat around the bush: Something about Lil Dicky just pisses me off at times. He's objectively a pretty good rapper, with good flows and rhyme schemes, but he just keeps bombarding you with half-assed joke after half-assed joke. It's different than when The Lonely Island or Childish Gambino hit the spot: When The Lonely Island does it, at least on their first album, they deliver most of the songs on there aggressive or smooth enough to give you the impression that they're dudes who genuinely love hip-hop who coincidentally just happen to be saying funny shit, and Childish Gambino can make me cringe, but can come up with some clever as shit lines, whereas Lil Dicky mainly comes through with obvious jokes that're good for one listen, but then will probably annoy you on repeated listens.

That combined with the fact that he nearly constantly gives off the vibe of "I'm rapping ironically, y'know, as a joke, but also not really" and often beats the living shit out of his own jokes on this mixtape (just look at the fact that this mixtape has SEVENTEEN songs of basically constant awkward jokes) and while the lyrical content can be funny and diverse at times, a lot of them boil down to the same basic punchlines, like talking about his dick, the music suddenly cutting out and him making a joke, him making snarky comments as the song fades out, or being sarcastic in general when talking about whatever.

It sucks because his voice is cool, and he can actually rap pretty well (see the admittedly funny "Ex-Boyfriend" and "The Cypher" which uses the beat from the Shady 2.0 cypher) and if he actually took himself more seriously, I can hear potential of me actually bumping his shit but as it is with the mixtape, sure I'll throw a few in my "shuffle" playlist, but the rest of the project leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. At an hour and almost seven minutes long, it feels like a movie that's funny for the first 15 minutes and then nothing's surprising, no matter how good the special effects or actors are.

5/10
________________________________________________________
Feel free to check out this mixtape for FREE on DatPiff!