Hi, everyone. Headthony Creasetano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new mixtape from ian, 2005.

ian is a rapper and songwriter who's been making waves online for a handful of years now. And consistently time and time and time again, despite how deeply unimpressed I and many others seemingly are with his music, he has really managed to make a name for himself off of all these extremely boring and derivative songs on his debut mixtape and album. That would be Goodbye Horses and Valedictorian, records that he both dropped last year because they were each so short and so low effort that they could be pumped out in that span of time.

I don't really know if there's much to say about that leg of Ian's career that I haven't already put into previous reviews. I mean, it's exactly the music you would imagine a terminally online white guy making if he just got into rap music in the last few years. For the most part was like nailing down some of the aesthetics but had little to nothing in terms of a distinct vocal style or delivery, average flows, lyrics that you would never give a second thought in a million years, and brain rot song lengths that are essentially engineered for maximum replay value. That is essentially the ian formula on these first projects.

However, on his latest one here, it does sound maybe a little bit like he is taking some of the criticisms those records, and he personally, have been receiving to heart. Either that or maybe the way his fame has been panning out in very recent months has lit a fire under his ass and given him something of note to say or communicate.

I mean, take the opening track, for example, which I will say, while it is undeniably music, this track feels more like a tweet than a song, as much of it deals in complaints that he's had in the wake of getting so much negative attention on what he does. He's coming in to remind us that he just cannot be stopped. Of course, these statements are set to some epic horns to really help ian seal the deal on the moment.

It's all fine and good in concept, but you're brought back down to Earth when you think about how this is all in service of the career of ian, someone whose creative trajectory so far is that of a meme rapper who somehow is trying to be taken seriously.

What's worse is that ian is still difficult to take seriously, even when he's not trying to say anything urgent, like on the following trap banger, "Aw Shit", where at one point, lyrically, he starts dropping these bars about how he talks to an officer about presumably speeding. If ian were to be pulled over by a cop, I guarantee he'd be on his whitest voice possible.

But again, with ian getting a bit more experimental and expressive on this project, we get moments like "You Told Me", where he's rapping/yelling in a very passionate fashion over these distorted fart bass lines. Yes, they really do just sound like distorted farts. Eventually, there is a beat switch toward the back end of the song, but the only reason it sounds good is because everything up until that point is boring as hell. For the most part, it just sounds like ian is trying to do something that sounds deeper than it is or ultra left field or experimental because it's drumless. It just sounds like, I don't know, Baby's First Ambient Out There Rap Song, with repeated refrains on the back end of ian saying that he's way above average when literally everything he has done in music so far is very below average, whether it be vocals, lyrics, production, or again, anything. The beats on this record make the rudimentary elements of Oddfuture's early production sound like fucking Mozart.

Going further to prove just how derivative and unimaginative many of the ideas on this record are, we have "I Ain't Coming Back", which pretty much sounds like a record you would produce if you went through a breakup and you heard Kid Cudi and Kanye West one time. I mean, it's so close in style and tone that, I mean, if you did want to hear a breakup song in this style, you would just go listen to one of those artists, not ian.

Unfortunately, though, this breakup, this romance that ian seems to really be infatuated with, it is also a topic of several other songs on this album, too, including the following "Talk About It", whose relationship dynamics come across, in my opinion, as utterly demented. It's wild to hear ian sounding as upset as he is on the song, where chief among the relationship issues on this track, you have ian citing, "You don't like me when I'm high, and I don't like you when I'm not." Yeah, why does our relationship suck? I'm high all the time, and when I'm not high, I don't even like you.

It's funny because ian spends the majority of the track trying to paint this other person as annoying and like some parasite or someone who would take advantage of him. Meanwhile, just through his own words, he makes himself sound even more unlikable.

Look, here's the thing that I'm seeing with ian on this project. With his past album and mixtape, he really just came out of the gate successful off of the back of just making drivel. Unrepentant-ass meaningless pap. Now, with a lot of the stuff that has happened to him in the wake of blowing up, he's feeling some type of way about how he's been criticized, either personally or artistically. He feels some type of way about relationships he's been in, people he's surrounded by. This is now giving him something to actually write about.

However, this guy did not get famous writing about much of anything. So now when he's actually trying to write about stuff he is emotional over, he sounds ridiculous because he lacks the voice, he lacks the musicality, he lacks the style and poeticism to make any of it work or convey any real conviction. So much of the time, a lot of the songs on this thing amount to not much more than a boring tantrum. You have to have more going for you than just passion to do that and actually make it work and sound entertaining and inspire others as you do so.

So yeah, while ian, I think, is bringing, again, more emotions and maybe a bit more of a personal message on this record than he has in the past, pretty much nothing else about what he does has been improved upon in any significant way, which is why I'm feeling a light 2 on this one.

Anthony Fantano, ian, Forever.