This new ian project, it's not good. ian, he's a Dallas rapper who's popping off right now. I feel like he and the music he's pushing is one of the biggest "so what?"s I've heard come out of the music industry in a while. Here's the appeal of ian in a nutshell: he essentially rips off Playboi Carti mercilessely, as well as a Lil Baby, the auto-tune on their voice, his vocal inflections. He does this while pretty much flexing the fact that he's just your average white bro. Like, "Oh, man, he's doing the 'had to do it to em' meme. Oh, man. Oh, my gosh."

I'll say it: there's nothing inherently funny about being white and also being a rapper. If there is some worthwhile comedy in that dynamic at this point, it most likely is totally played out. The real joke of Valedictorian is that ian is trying to build a career off of just bluntly ripping off his contemporaries and just passing in a carbon copy of their work without putting his own personality or spin on it at all. I would actually say in the case of multiple tracks here, like "Omakase", ian is handing in much shittier versions of the songs by the artist he's inspired by.

And to mention another track, which I really don't want to do, the lazy and effortless rapping all over the track "Judgment" is so boring. The song is a chore to listen to even at two minutes. This record is just a meme, it's just viral marketing being used as a front to cover for painfully mediocre music. I feel like at the end of the day, what ian is doing would be fine if it were just simply presented as a bit of a hee-hee-haha joke, a comedy bit. It would be annoying for sure, but I would see more validity in it. But that's not how ian's music so far is being treated. It's being presented to me and many other people as if I'm supposed to take his stuff as seriously as I would like any other Lyrical Lemonade artist, for example. Of course, there's going to be a lot of inevitable Asher Roth comparisons to what ian is doing here, but even that feels like several steps up from what we're getting on this tape. At least Asher Roth, during that initial era of his "I Love College" career, could write a song and had some actual production value behind what he did.

Meanwhile, this over here is just junk. To anyone desperately defending this tape in the comments, I promise you, and I guarantee you, there are at least two dudes in your friend group right now who could poop out this tape in a day. And by the way, that's not a dig at ian's technical abilities or skills when it comes to rapping. I don't mind artists who are a little rough around the edges or a little punk in spirit. No, it's a comment on Valedictorian's incredibly profound lack of creative effort. But yeah, here you go. If you somehow are interested and love it, we have the white boy who has built a name for himself, ripping off Playboi Carti.

Yeah, this thing sucks. It's not good.