All Dae – “Body Time Space” (Mixtape Review)
Oakland rapper All Dae released a full length mixtape in April. “Body Time Space” is meant to be a thought provoking project that explores various social topics, but does it hold up?
Conscious rap is some of the most impactful music in existence, on the condition that it articulates itself well, is thorough, and engages the listener. Otherwise it becomes a feeble attempt to seem enlightened. All Dae touches on racism, the treatment of women, and police brutality as his more prevalent social commentary topics. That’s it though, he basically just talks about them. As far as racism and police brutality, he essentially says “I don’t like this” and then gives up discussing them for all the insight he provides. He doesn’t give us anything meaningful in the discussion about women either. Dae vaguely describes the way he romances women and then declares that you, the listener, could pull chicks like him if you acted the way he does. I’ve heard the song about five times and I still don’t know what it is he’s doing “differently.”
All Dae has quite possibly the slowest flow I’ve ever heard, which is not inherently a bad thing. The reason it’s hard to spin it into a positive is that he is rarely on beat, making his drawn out delivery very clunky and hard to listen to. All Dae also has a good vocabulary of words. Note that I did not say rhymes, as many times throughout the album, he uses said vocabulary to rhyme but not to make intelligent sentences. Two exact quotes from his song “MissDangerousV1.0” illustrate this point perfectly.
“We exchanged visions and information that made life blatant.”
Blatant is not used correctly here. I can kind of understand that he was likely trying to say life became clear, as blatant means obvious, but it’s far too liberal usage of the word. Not every word can be used universally. Context matters a lot.
“My mentality is like gravity so naturally it had to be.”
The problem with this line is that it’s a set up for a punchline that never comes. You can’t just say X is like Y without informing the listener of how you made that connection unless it is super… blatant. The line that is supposed to explain that connection actually never addresses it. I get the idea behind gravity being something that just naturally exists, that sentiment simply doesn’t tie in to All Dae’s previously mentioned mentality. Let’s assume he means that he goes with the flow and it is what it is; that is some basic level writing. No matter how you look at this, it’s just bad, but he closes the song out by repeating this a second time.
Now, after all that negativity, here’s a positive- the instrumentals are good. I honestly can’t say that any of them were unappealing. They had really good, near professional quality and were engaging to listen to. The mixing did not follow suit, however. Rarely did Dae’s vocals sound cohesive to the beat he was rapping on, just on a sonic sense. More often then not, his vocals are too loud over the beat and feel entirely disjointed from it.
Honestly, the best songs on the mixtape are the ones featuring The People’s Tree, if only because All Dae picks words out of thin air to fill his incredibly thinly layered lines, and sounds bored doing so. How are we not expected to feel the same way?
Rating: 3/10
Highlights: Production
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