Iamsu! – Sincerely Yours

While the last few years have blurred the line between albums and mixtapes, rappers insist on stressing the personal importance of their debut album, that is, the first album after the deal comes. Music, plenty of it even, has been released, but this is where your career starts. For Iamsu! it has been an interesting ride. Repping the least celebrated (at least in a rap sense) major American region usually proves fruitless, but a string of beats and verses on some of the most fun regional/Internet hits of the past few years, including LoveRance's "Up," E-40's "Function" and of course, Sage the Gemini's "Gas Pedal," created a buzz unheard of for a Bay Area artist. There was never a single hit song attributed solely to him, but he clearly represented something significant for California rap.

2013 found Su being lapped by his contemporaries YG, Ty Dolla $ign, Problem and HBK member Sage The Gemini, each with multiple radio hits, each fitting into rap's current ratchet/strip club narrative. A growing number of blog posts aside, Iamsu, who had always seemed so poised to take over, had yet to make a dent into the national scene even as rap's go-to sound gravitated toward his home state. With Sincerely Yours Su was set to finally make his mark, to properly declare the start of an outstanding career.

Much of the music on Sincerely matches up with the rest of his catalogue, technically sound and enjoyable. His personality is present but the songs don't scream superstar. He does things you'd expect from his debut – mentioning putting on for the Bay and being the first to bypass that handicap – but this collection of songs feels more like an extension of his many mixtapes. If there's an aspect of the album that leans more towards the modern mainstream, it's the songs that resemble music by 2 Chainz, Wiz and Drake, filled with cliches that sound good but don't really mean anything. The lead single "Only That Real" might have made serious noise two years ago but is generally forgettable in the year of DJ Mustard.

Su's ability as a rapper has never been questioned. He's incredibly capable of putting words together in interesting ways, but he really shows off his ear for melody on many of these songs. He doesn't just sing through Auto-tune. His voice becomes an instrument in itself. Think R&B Future meets Kanye on "Say What's Real." On "Stop Signs" there's no hesitance to hit a higher register and demonstrate a bit of vibrato. Some of the most interesting moments, both from a production sense and a lyrical one, happen on the album's interludes. It's as if Iamsu is at his best when creating in a confined space whether for a 16 bar guest verse or a two minute interlude.

There's plenty to appreciate about Sincerely Yours, but the best debuts of the new millenium – The College Dropout, good kid, m.A.A.d. City, even My Krazy Life – had higher aspirations. Iamsu is from the Bay. He's used to being under appreciated. He just need to change things enough for the world to finally respond.

Film School: Neighbors

He's had some duds in the past few years, but Seth Rogen is officially a bankable comedy star. He's not putting up Ferrell and Sandler box office numbers, but he's gotten to the point where his production company releases a movie every summer. He's reliable enough for laughs that even with members of the Apatow family as co-stars in some of his most recent work, he's still the main attraction for most moviegoers. There is just too much wrong with Neighbors for Rogen to save the day this time around.

From the jump, I was confused with the Zac Efron casting. There's no obvious alternative, and that's probably how he got the job, but is he even famous really? The premise of the movie is not that a fraternity moves in next door. It's that the married couple played by Rogen and Rose Byrne don't want to come to terms with the boring lifestyle their newborn daughter has brought. They want to be cool again — if you didn't get this, they literally repeat it four times in the first half hour — and oh by the way, a fraternity moves in next door.

The movie is all jokes. This isn't a bad thing. Good comedies aren't necessarily heartwarming films. It's just that so many of them fall flat in the same way all the "by the hymen of Olivia Newton-John" type jokes did in Anchorman 2. Some of them probably could have been. Hannibal Buress and Jerrod Carmichael are very funny guys, and they weren't used properly. There's a scene where Efron and Dave Franco's characters go back and forth in this non-sense one-up battle. Franco pulls it off. Efron doesn't. If you're directing this (I assume) big budget comedy, shouldn't you realize this?

It's hard to tell when they gave up on the movie. Is it when they decided to throw 10 cameos in the first act? Or was it in the editing room because there are some weird cuts in this movie.

If there's a bright spot, it's that Rogen, the actor, isn't washed up. He's the movie's highlight. He's fat, loveable and knows how to deliver jokes. We saw that in Knocked Up, and we still saw that in This Is The End. Rogen, the idea man and producer and Hollywood big shot and hopeful starmaker, may need to step back and re-evaluate the results from his recent work.

Bay Area Singles Report (April 2014)

1-O.A.K. – "Slide Thru" (feat. P-Lo)
There's two things actively working against this song. 1-O.A.K. is a very difficult name to google. And there's already a song out called "Slide Thru." Disregard that for a second because I can't get enough of this song. I believe 1-O.A.K. taught at the community center that the HBK kids worked at and mentored a few of them specifically. He's been featured on their songs here and there, but this is his first foray into an actual solo career. This song is a hit if I ever heard one. I love how it goes from hook to rap verse to hook to sung verse and doesn't follow a typical song structure. And if we really let "Who Booty" be a thing two years ago, there's no reason this song can't work out.

Iamsu – "Show Me" (feat. 50 Cent & Jay Ant)
I talked about this here.

Young Bari – "Bigger Than Me"
After hearing his verses on the HBK Gang tape and E-40's album(s) last year, I was really excited to hear a proper full length from Young Bari. Bari's been loosely affiliated with the HBK guys, and it was his song that the Gang claims DJ Mustard borrowed from. His voice is super interesting, sort of like Katt Williams meets Young Thug, and, at least from the features I heard in 2013, the kid can flow. But his Mob Solo mixtape was just boring to me. It's a lot of stories about his life but not in any interesting sense. His hooks get repetitive, and he could have used some better beats.

D-Lo – "Ghetto" (feat. Magnolia Chop & Sleepy D)
D-Lo's Keep It On The D-Lo album flew right under the radar, but it really is excellent. It's unfortunate that KMEL doesn't play local music because, like I mentioned when the Mustard/HBK riff started to gather steam, this album is way more representative of the Bay Area sound I identify with (think Traxamillion and hyphy-era EA-Ski). Sage and 'em might have people convinced all there is to do here is party, but "Ghetto" brings back an aggression the East Bay has been missing. I could do without the off-key hook, but you don't really get more Bay Area than that.

G-Eazy – "Let's Get Lost"
I honestly haven't paid much attention to G-Eazy. One, because he's white, and two, because his name is G-Eazy. He's bubbled on the scene for a little while now and has been much more successful than his cohorts during the same time frame (because he's white). Up to this point, there hasn't been a song that identifies him as an artist, but he's clearly on his way to stardom. And in a post-Macklemore-texting-Kendrick world, it's sickening how aware of his situation he probably is. "Let's Get Lost" isn't even that bad of a song. It's actually kind of good. It's the type of song you can rock with publicly until you inevitably see a sorority girl singing along to it. The video is very well done too.

Adrian Marcel – "2am" (feat. Sage The Gemini)
This technically wasn't released in April, but it's actually sorta in rotation at KMEL. In terms of R&B joints by random California artists, "2am" is better than TeeFlii's "This D" but not quite Rayven Justice's "Slide Thru". That is my assessment of this song.

P-Lo – "Can't Tell Me Nothin" (feat. Kool John & Skipper)
This is a Mannie Fresh ripoff with some boring raps.

Mila – "Hell Yeah" (feat. Clyde Carson)
I'm happy Sage basically brought real club songs back, ones meant for dancing and not aggressively jumping up and down. I live in the South Bay though, and the music that gets played here is so perplexingly random it makes my brain want to explode. Hopefully some club in Oakland will play this regularly. The NSFW video is a nice touch.

Derek King – "What It Do" (feat. IAmSu!)
Where did all these R&B guys come from? And why do they all have names that are so difficult to remember? Iamsu is very good at rapping. He also tends to say nice things about women in rapping form, and it's not even corny. I already forgot whoever sings this song's name.

Book Club: Crime and Punishment, Tim Cowlishaw + Tina Fey

Book Club (May/April 2014)

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Obviously this is considered one of the greatest pieces of literature in human history, but I just wish it was a little bit shorter. Technically, I think I had the unabridged version and the print was tiny and very close together, but 500 pages is a lot of reading. I will probably read this again down the line because it deserves re-reading and I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I missed out on. I don't think the book was perfect (and what I do know, right?). Some of the dialogue tends be way too verbose, but when Dostoevsky gets it right, it can be downright chilling.

Drunk On Sports by Tim Cowlishaw
I love Around the Horn on ESPN. It's one of the few shows I still enjoy on any ESPN network. I don't really have a group of favorite analysts from the show, but I always enjoy when Tim Cowlishaw is on. This show in particular includes glimpses of the analysts' true personalities, but just because you watch someone on TV doesn't meant you actually know anything about his or her personal life. Drunk On Sports isn't a memoir so much as it is a story about an alcoholic who didn't realize he was an alcoholic, continued to be an alcoholic and finally decided not to be an alcoholic. It's not a self-help book, as he iterates on multiple occasions because he never found those helpful for his own problems. His actual sports reporting stories are great – all the stuff with Jimmy Johnson and the Cowboys, stories about actually working for a local paper and its transitions throughout the years. But there's a lot to take from his story about how to approach, deal with and, really, diagnose an alcoholic, especially one whose life isn't necessarily in shambles.

Bossypants by Tina Fey
I like Tina Fey. I wasn't super into SNL, but I was a huge 30 Rock fan. I knew there were mixed reviews about this book, but I wanted to read it anyway. I read Mindy Kaling's book a couple years ago and really enjoyed it, and I just assumed I would feel the same way about this. It starts off pretty weird. It's a memoir, but she tends to intentionally keep so many details to herself, and her childhood really isn't all that interesting. But it takes a turn for the better when she starts telling stories about her time at SNL and later on 30 Rock. The first third of the book had me thinking Fey's humor didn't translate well to 15-page chapters, but by the time she gets to the NBC years, there are moments I literally laughed out loud. She also opens up about being a woman in the industry and being a mother and whether having more kids will affect her career, and I definitely appreciated this as well. As much as it's obvious women don't get proper respect within the comedy/sitcom world, it's nice to hear specifics from someone who works both in front of the camera and behind the scenes.

IamSu! feat. 50 Cent & Jay Ant – Show Me

When 50 Cent hopped on LoveRance's "Up," it was a move meant to keep himself somewhat relevant and help give a local hit some national shine. He had been charitably flocking verses to everyone from Too Short to one-offs like Mann that it had become routine over that time period. So while he actually shouted out HBK on "Up" and appeared in the video, it probably didn't occur to anyone that there was a relationship between Fif and Su or any the HBK kids.

On Wednesday Jay Ant threw out the song, claiming it had not made Su's upcoming debut Sincerely Yours. 50 is also in album promo mode, so it kind of makes you think where his starpower and credibility is at if a great song like this won't even make IamSu's album. This is definitely one of Jay's more accessible beats. It soothes in the way most of his music does without intentionally being extra trippy. Su has been playing around with the auto-tuned flow for almost two years now, and especially in the wake of guys like Young Thug, it's great to see someone use his voice as an instrument as uniquely as he does here. 50 also shines here. He basically follows Su's style, but he's clearly having fun stepping outside of his comfort zone.

The four singles he's dropped from Animal Ambition, while all technically good aren't anything to run home to. Perhaps 50 is in a position, at least creatively, to try these new styles instead trying to recreate feelings from his heyday. While there would almost certainly be a backlash, I would very much appreciate it.

This song is so much more interesting than the single Su actually decided to go with, it's a total bummer it isn't official. But if this ended up on the cutting room floor, I look forward to what ends up on the album.

I don't want to like HBO's "Silicon Valley"

HBO's newest comedy "Silicon Valley" premiered this Sunday. It follows Richard Hendrix (and his buddies) as he finds himself going from mindless employee at the show's version of Google to owner of his own potentially umpteen million dollar company after creating a lossless compression algorithm.

Aside from the show's creator Mike Judge's history, the cast and a two-minute preview HBO released a few months ago, I didn't know much about the show. But I didn't want to like it. I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. My parents aren't software engineers, but I've always been around that world. I ended up going to college at UC Berkeley to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and I now work at a company just like the people in the show.

I guess I appreciate that this world is getting some shine through the comedic lens of a guy like Mike Judge. I wouldn't compare my office to the one in Office Space, but I definitely feel like the only sane person in a room full of ridiculousness when at work. It's just that the software industry has completely blown up. There's so much money in this world that it doesn't even make any sense, and the industry has become this caricature of itself during that process. But there's so much more to life in the Valley than this. So if an outsider's only entry point into this world was The Social Network and news reports about how awesome Google's offices are, I didn't want another (likely more accessible to the average viewer) viewpoint to come from that angle. There's also several stereotypes about software engineers that I've always resented, especially while in college, and I probably took it personally that a significant HBO show could potentially portray that as the norm.

What I didn't learn until today was that Mike Judge worked as a programmer. Granted it was 30 years ago, he has more insight into what it's like to work at one of these companies than I ever thought he did. It's kind of inspiring to know that I could possibly go from what I do now to what he does now.

The pilot was okay. It was hard to not groan at the Jobs/Wozniak joke. It's also weird to watch a storyline about a guy's side project becoming a million dollar company in literally hours when I know that not only does this never happen, but also that most engineers just kind of exist without really contributing anything all that significant in the grand scheme of things. But I get it, it's a fucking TV show. I do appreciate the sort of inside jokes thrown in – about no girls being around, the absurd IPO party kind of lifestyle, the insults the guys in the house throw at each other – that reveal a deeper level of these friends' personalities. Because, in the end, the fact that the show is based here isn't what makes it funny or interesting. It's simply what drives the plot forward.

I don't see Silicon Valley catching up to Veep, which I believe to be funniest show on TV, in terms of quality, but I'll obviously continue to watch. I was never worried so much that the show would "portray us incorrectly." It was more that, if they were going to do this show, it better be good because I've forced myself to be personally invested in its reception. I'll probably write about it more here in the coming weeks.

TV Recap: Enlisted

I'm a big TV fan. I watch way more TV than most people I know, so I was shocked to find out about FOX's Enlisted for the first time last week, nine-tenths of the way through the show's first (and unfortunately last) season.

FOX had been batting well above .500 when it came to single-cam comedies, having found success with New Girl, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and (kinda/sorta) The Mindy Project. Enlisted fit right in with those other shows, and like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it found its footing as a convincing and overall funny show very quickly.

The show follows three brothers, solders assigned to the U.S. Army's rear detachment. The brothers along with the rest of the platoon make up a lovable pack of misfits that follow some typical sitcom tropes but still provide an interesting spin to the workplace comedy. It's about soldiers, but there's a nice balance of men and women and stories that include both points of view. And it doesn't just focus on the three brothers. The storylines in each episode involve most of the cast, or at least different combinations of the group, so the show is not just Michael Scott and the rest of the gang, which I appreciate.

Unfortunately, Enlisted aired at 9:30pm on Fridays. It wasn't moved there. That was its original timeslot. I'm a loser that does nothing on weekends, and even I don't watch TV on Friday nights. Last Friday the ninth and final episode, of a planned thirteen episodes, aired as FOX chose to remove it from the schedule.

On one hand, it's understandable. If you run the network, you have to get rid of something, and it's not going to be New Girl, Brooklyn or Mindy. And really, this is the type of show that gets fourth billing. It's genuinely funny but easy to not recognize amidst its network competition. Because of the low ratings, there probably wouldn't be a huge backlash at its cancellation. But the show (I just finished episode 6) really had potential. There isn't anything that separates Enlisted from Brooklyn Nine-Nine except that Andy Samberg stars in one of the shows, and its lack of star power or at least familiar faces (Chris Powell who plays the middle brother is probably the most famous for having played Piz in Veronica Mars) likely led it to the chopping block.

You could have easily placed it in Tuesday's comedy lineup and made it more significant, but for whatever reason Fox is choosing to keep faith in the middling Mindy Project. I don't know enough about how TV works to understand why a show needs to be cancelled, especially considering acclaimed sitcoms don't just fall from the sky. But I highly suggest watching the show. All episodes are currently available on Hulu, and hopefully the show finds life on Netflix or something along those lines.