A Very Smurt Retrospective Pt. 6: Creating a Magnum Opus

 A Very Smurt Retrospective Pt. 6: Creating a Magnum Opus

12/13/20

A seed sewed with a fresh idea fallen from a large and beloved tree must create branches of its own to survive in such a harsh climate. It is forced to go without rainwater and take too much water when it must, and continue to survive other spastic conditions and natural disasters. Its buds must face the shoes of the larger population so it too can tower over the monsters it once saw. Before his second era, Very Smurt was this tall, elegant tree that was given water by his fans in its youth so it could grow into the majestic and beautiful thing it had become eight months later. Though, this tree had became hollow overtime, with the termites of repetition invading it and consuming its lifeblood and passion. Without being cut down, it could have fallen in a random direction and caused much more chaos and negative results. Even though it would not have fallen at the time of its demise, its death was inevitable. Unfortunately to the eyes of many beloved fans, Very Smurt was the one who had to cut this tree down himself and let the new bud grow in its place. This along with keeping the new bud growing from a far enough distance as to avoid eventually clashing with the stump of its ancestor. As far as it may have been initially planted, its path of crossing over became abundantly inexorable, and this was no clearer than in the release of "Olimo".

"Olimo", released on September 20th, 2019, is Very Smurt's fifth album. It was announced on September 2nd, and the marketing was pretty par-for-the-course in terms of Very Smurt's past. The interesting mixed bag for a lot of people was the album itself. The almost finalized track list, shown off on September 10th, was worryingly shorter than that of his latest album "WOOb". This led people to believe that Smurt was not planning to go all out for this new album, but the album ended up having a longer runtime due to its lack of smaller interludes. In fact, that was the problem a lot of people had with "WOOb", despite such a drastic shift in style so quickly and unexpectedly. The track list also looked just about as stylistically diverse as his last album, which led people to believe this was "WOOb" 2, in essence. While it was in theory the sequel to his last, it really centered its style and found it quickly as opposed to the former being far more experimental. The track list, in a lot of ways, had pissed off fans of both albums. For the firsties, (fans of the first era), this album seemed like a follow-up to Smurt's latest album in which they inherently disliked to at least some degree for being so different. For the seconders, (fans of the second era), they were concerned about the more grounded-seeming and shorter track list. However, none of this controversy brought down hype. If anything, hype was increased when this released because people had more to speculate about and get excited to hear for themselves.

When the album released, anyone who may have denied it or thought it would have been poor in any way was almost completely disproven. The album opens with a nice electric piano jazzy chord progression that reflects on the first year of Very Smurt with Lil Creeper, and they both deliver witty bars and great verses. Next comes a more aggressive banger with Da Real Meme, driven by a raging, catchy melody in a strange key played with a dubstep instrument. Smurt's verses feature some of the best bars in this album, and in turn some of the best of his career, but where this track really shines is in its diverse dynamics and clever production. The song opens with that melody and Smurt quickly comes in spitting these angry bars with hilarious lyrics as more instruments pile on to create an amazing drop into the chorus. The chorus section shows the importance of bass, as that's what the entire drop relies on, and it does great. We then get hit with three or four different layered drum loops all compiled on top of each other complementing Da Real Meme's vocals. After this we have the chorus, which now sounds lame without those other drum loops and a second verse from Very Smurt. Finally, every drum loop along with the melody come together at the end over the chorus to create a grand finale. After this we get "This Duck", a hilarious song that does not stop bombarding you with catchy segments buried inside witty and explicit bars. The song is a story about Very Smurt's white-water rafting experience where he feared he would hit a duck, ending in the illegalizing of the entire Mallard species. This ruling was later deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but it made for a great story and one hell of a banger.

The fourth track is "spider-man", which falls short of the legacy the classic once-per-album trio with Very Smurt, Lil P, and Da Real Meme. Many enjoyed it, but a lot of the lyrics felt sort of rushed and left the lyrics of the past three completely unfazed. The album continues to fall short of sheer perfectness with the next track. It features a sub-par verse from Very Smurt, even comparing it to his most recent verse, an awkwardly-delivered hook, and a reused Stacey's Dad verse. This song made up for its shittiness by letting the listener take a moment to step back from their immersion in the album's genuinely funny parts and have a chance to laugh at it rather than with it. After the first hook, the entire song feels like it was made to be insanely dumb, which is honestly a very unique idea, and acknowledges how newer fans see Smurt's older material. Next was the special instrument rap of the album. There wasn't really much special to see here, but it brought the listener back into the jokes rather than looking down on how bad certain parts were. Next was yet another banger in the vein of the former, but this time faster and featuring Lil P. To close out the first act of the album, we have "The U.S. Debt", which is debatably one of Smurt's weirdest tracks in his discography. It's a sung acoustic live recording akin to a lot of the older interludes Smurt has done, but this time with extraordinarily strange lyrics. All in all, it's a great song that makes you feel very uncomfortable with its weirdness and it's odd amount of genuine aggression towards the woman whom he sings about. This, however, makes the lines that are genuinely hilarious Smurt bars that much better due to the context they were forced into.

The second side of the album comes in with yet another track with a reused Stacey's Dad verse. The rest of "The Bi Guyz" clearly tries to be good, but is brought down so much by the previous factor that it struggles to make the song memorable. However, what follows is one of the funniest tracks on the album which brings you back to that "looking down and laughing at" perspective. This track tricks you by introducing a slow synth pad for about 20 seconds of the two-minute song and immediately drops into a collage of stupidly off-key and loud drum loops with Smurt wailing over it in different voices. It also features a German verse from Lil P which works surprisingly well. Next we have a track going into some more details about the extensive and strange lore of Smurt, where he tells a story about opening a hat empire in England. Then another pretty straightforward and funny verse over a great beat by G-goraptor, officiating the newfound alliance between the Gang Gang and Kuricha Clan. Then we have a parody of an instrumental shown off in "The Office U.S." which packs in perhaps the best Big Bird verse of all time. The first verse proved the beat to be a bit too fast for Smurt's comfort, but he did manage to pack a decent verse in and a creative interpretation of the actual episode scene which the song came from. Next, we find a Louis Armstrong parody, which is admittedly one of the weirder choices the album packs in. As a true finale to follow up, we get "Pie"; a track in which both its amount of different beats and length in minutes exceed the number of characters in its title. It begins with an instrumental synth intro, which quickly segues into a skit from "Family Guy" over an upright bass sample. Then, perhaps the chillest beat on the album which is basically a soul sample where Smurt and Lil P drop great verses about none other than the desert: pie. Finally, an up-beat trap instrumental featuring Lil Creeper, to come full-circle with the first track, and a surprisingly deep verse from Very Smurt that embodies the essence and themes of the album in a strangely somber way.

September 20th, 2019 was a date that will forever leave people in utter awe from their first listen through Very Smurt's fifth album. It was absolutely praised like a god by critics; mainly for its intelligent way of meshing the first and second era's style in a way that still felt like progressing rather than reminiscing. With many of the albums covered in this series thus far, none have been so bland surrounding them. This album's marketing was standard, and other than a handful of unique alternate cover art pieces, this album never really stood out. Despite anything it has going against it though, it certainly brought a lot of Smurt fans together. Bringing fans of the old and fans of the new together to accept a style headed in a generally different direction they were hoping for is a hard thing to do. However, this may not have been so hard for this album, because "Olimo" is wonderful. It brought a lot of fresh ideas to the table, and made for a truly satirical rap godsend. It stayed grounded when it needed to, and when completely sprinting off the damn walls whenever it wanted. It was a masterpiece, and arguably the album that remains Smurt's true magnum opus to this day long after his retirement.