It's a busy Monday night at Tufts, and students are filing into Brown and Brew to crack open the books. The study mood was set by a local pop/hip-hop radio station playing a club mix.
Nobody was surprised when Akon's hit song "Smack That" came on the air, or even when his other radio-friendly hit "I Wanna Love You" played ten minutes later. When the two songs were repeated a half hour later, though, some began to wonder if anyone was manning the DJ booth. But when both songs were repeated for a third time within an hour and a half, it wasn't clear if Akon was personally holding a gun to the DJ's head in order to execute his complete saturation of the airwaves.
Such an act would not be surprising coming from this "Konvict," who, in the last five years, has been convicted of armed robbery, drug charges and grand theft auto (not the game, the real deal). Somehow, in between his jail time, Akon has managed to release two enormously successful albums: 2004's "Trouble," as well as his latest, "Konvicted."
The musical quality of street culture hip-hop has changed a lot since N.W.A. Once, rappers focused on organizing explosive lyrics, and the beats and background music used to be, well, in the background, making their lack of differentiation a moot point. Now, it seems that for much of the everyday "danceable" hip-hop that the musical aspects have taken the front seat, and that the lyrics have become the new filler material.
Just when they thought nobody was listening, though, certain lyrics, such as these, come along that make the careful listener either laugh at their absurdity, or despair over the way in which they reinforce a morally corrupt media. Whether you listen to the lyrics or not, however, the musical quality on "Konvicted" leaves much to be desired.
For those who haven't heard, though, Akon's voice has been hailed as a brilliant fusion of African vocal stylings and American hip-hop. It more closely resembles that of Cher when she sings "Do you believe in life after love?" with that high, shaky, digitally enhanced quality and a range of only a few recurring notes. Loop these notes over and over again in a string of highly repetitive songs and it becomes increasingly difficult to listen to the album in one sitting. As for the style and beats, their most obvious quality is a lack of originality. Most striking is the verse in "I Wanna F-k You" which sounds exactly like a verse in Nelly's "Ride With Me."
Even the catchiest song on the album, "Don't Matter" is a rip-off of R. Kelly's "Ignition Remix." A generic love song, it mirrors the long melodic drone of the song that launched his career, "Mr. Lonely." As a departure from his previous marketing strategy, this simple, harmless track was pushed to the backburner to make Akon sound more edgy.
Such a strategy seems to have been applied to the extreme, as the two hit songs that get so much airtime extol quite possibly the most sexist and misogynistic view of women in recent popular music. The singles were also heavily promoted based on the guest appearances by Snoop Dogg and Eminem, who do manage to give the listener a break from Akon's incessantly whiney voice, but in their quest to add edginess the result reflects an even worse mixture of bad intentions and bad lyricism.
On one hand, the fact is obvious, even from the titles. From the beginning, someone listening to "Smack That" is smacked over the head, so to speak, by the fact that Akon and Eminem are equating sex with violence. Delving deeper, though, instead of saying "I'm going to smack that," Akon says he wants to, "bend you over/ look back and watch me/ smack that." It is hard to find words that better capture such extreme objectification.
Astonishingly, Akon sees his music as having a positive impact. He has been quoted saying, "I can't tell people what not to do, but I can be a role model." He is most likely referring to his other favorite topic: sympathizing with gangsters. Granted gangsters are people too, and many are tragically caught up in a corrupt system, but there is no improvement in the quality of penmanship that sets it apart from his less serious songs.
Considering the intensity of the reactions to "Konvicted," commercial success on one side, protest over the lyrics on the other and laughter over his absurdity somewhere in the middle, one can conclude that Akon is definitely talented at something. Just what that talent is, and whether it is good or tremendously harmful to our culture and music itself is up to the listener to decide.
