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wyattvsmusic · 3 years

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Ghetts - Conflict Of Interest ALBUM REVIEW

I don’t think I have gone this long without writing a review. There’s been plenty of good music coming out but none that I really have a ton to say about. Ghetts is easily top 3 UK Hip Hop artists / Grime MCs and I have been waiting for this album to come out for a while now. He definitely has the strongest and most consistent discography out of any of his peers as he never made a shitty pop album when everyone in the UK scene was doing that to make money in the late 2000s/early 2010s. There is no one who raps like him and he just seems to be getting better and better. With his last album, 2018′s Ghetto Gospel: The New Testament, it seemed like that was the album he had been working up to his entire career as it sounded more polished and it contained some of the best songs he’s ever made but now that Conflict Of Interest is finally out, it makes it seem like The New Testament was just a great step in order to get to this point. All of these factors, along with all of the incredible singles that dropped in promotion for this album set my expectations extremely high. I don’t think I have anticipated an album this much maybe since Bandana came out. With that being said and having listened to the album, those expectations were absolutely met and I haven’t stopped listening to it since. Like the cover art and title of the album suggest, there are different sides to Ghetts. There’s Justin, there’s Ghetto and there’s Ghetts, which are all different stages in his life and these stages have different interests. Justin wants to be the best father for his children and take care of his family while Ghetto wants to be the best MC and will take on any challenger for the title. And then there is Ghetts, who doesn’t want to be confined to any title, genre or any sort of limit—he wants to be the best artist he can be and push boundaries. This is explained at the beginning of the album version of Mozambique but all three of these components of Ghetts are combined to make this masterpiece of an album. One thing I didn’t know about until after my first listen was that this album was released through Warner. Ghetts has been independent for so long and with this album, he’s getting that attention by a major label that he deserves but he’s already an established artist, meaning he’s doing it on his own terms. Right off the bat, he comes through on the intro firing off sick lines like “Strap on the lap like a serviette.” Fine Wine makes for the perfect intro and then seamlessly transitions into the lead single, Mozambique, which is simply incredible. I have never heard a song like Mozambique. South African artist Moonchild Sanelly features on the hook, which is really good but I have never heard a hook on a rap song quite like that. Birmingham rapper JayKae spits on the second verse as well. Rude Kid deserves a standing ovation for the production on this song. The first beat is crazy good and I was blown away when he flipped Ghetts’s song Top 3 Selected for the latter part of his first verse. The second beat was the one that really blew me away as the transition made sense but that beat is so mean and Ghetts’s more slowed down flow on it made it stand out even more. The last 15 seconds on the song even made a lasting impression as the squealing G-Funk sound gives the song one final punch. Fire and Brimstone goes so hard and the Dizzee Rascal ad-libs were a nice addition. Hop Out is another banger in the same vein as Fire and Brimstone. The way Ghetts switches in and out of different flows on this song is crazy. IC3 is a long overdue collaboration between Ghetts and Skepta but the fact that it’s finally happening now makes it so much more special. The two legends have clashed before and have been on radio sets together and IC3 is definitely makes for an iconic moment in UK history because of all of the history in the Movement and Boy Better Know era which Ghetts mentions in another song. Skepta utilizing his classic lines from Autopsy and the clip of their radio set with Kano at the end of the song where they spit each other’s lyrics makes the song so much more perfect for their first song together after all these years. Skepta’s flow on the song is straight fire while Ghetts’s is more laid back but he is able to float over the beat and showcase his signature rhyming style. As I mentioned before, there are so many different stages in Ghetts’s life and career and Autiobigraphy does an amazing job of going back into some significant moments. This section of the album is definitely the most personal with songs like Dead to Me and Sonya. There is also 10,000 Tears, which features Ed Sheeran. I didn’t really know what to expect from this song as the last time these two collaborated was before Ed Sheeran became one of the biggest musicians ever. I do love this song a lot. If it was Ghetts by himself, it would be an amazing song and if it was Ed by himself it would also be amazing, which speaks to how good it actually is. Proud Family is a song about loving one’s family unconditionally that really touches the soul. I hope that fans who know a bit about Ghetts’s family through songs like Jess Song were touched by this song as much as I was. One of the best things about this song is the hook, which Ghetts sings himself. I didn’t know that when it was released as a single so I was really impressed that he sounded so good. The album then moves on to a run of songs that go super hard. Skengman sounds like what the theme song would be if Ghetts played James Bond. The beat is so menacing and like I said about IC3, Ghetts floats on the beat like no other and spits one of the best lines on the album which is “I was 19 with a gun twice my age.” He then comes back in on the third verse with a mean verse where he attacks the beat in the way that Ghetto would back in the 2000s. Stormzy comes through with a dope verse as well. He doesn’t normally get to rap like this on his own albums so it was really nice to hear him with Ghetts on their first collab since Bad Boys. This song really does sound like an epic movie scene. The song Squeeze also sounds like an epic movie scene. Speaking of James Bond, Ghetts had a sick line on Dead To Me where he raps “I thought we was bonding to live and let die / For your eyes only you know me I'm Roger Moore” in reference to two Roger Moore James Bond films. No Mercy goes so fucking hard and I really wish that I could see it performed live. The hook is kind of quirky in a really fun way. It’s very playful even though the song’s content is so mean. The song features Pa Salieu, who I believe is the next big thing to make a significant impression on the UK scene if he hasn’t already. I highly recommend listening to his mixtape Send Them To Coventry, which I sort of liked at first but has really grown on me with every listen—now I love it. The song also features Salieu’s close collaborator BackRoad Gee, who never fails to bring the energy plenty of adlibs. I knew Crud was going to be a banger before Ghetts started rapping and I was not wrong at all. He went in on the song and his hook was really fun as well. When Giggs came in on the song, he really made it his own. They rap so differently but the beat works well for both of them. Giggs is very hit or miss for me. Sometimes he can be really bad but when he tries he can do incredible things and this verse was hard. The album’s momentum builds and comes to an end at the climax, which is Little Bo Peep. I have never heard a hip hop song like this ever. Wretch 32′s hook sounded incredible and though it did what it needed to do, I think a verse from him would’ve been amazing. Speaking of amazing, Dave killed it and Hamzaa used this song as her time to shine. Although there are some amazing features and Ghetts is the star of the show, one star of this album is producer TenBillion Dreams, who produced half of the album. His production style is very unique and excelled at making Ghetts’s rapping style really stand out. This album also did a great job at showing how Ghetts’s rapping style has evolved over the years. He’s more mature and his verses are very carefully worded. The crazy rhyme schemes are still there but it sounds much different; it shows his growth as an artist. Speaking of rapping and production, this album is not really a grime album at all, which is something I don’t really care about that much because this album is so good, Ghetts has given us plenty of Grime over the years and he is not just a Grime MC. My one issue with this album is the length and that is it. Conflict Of Interest is an incredible album that shows all the different sides to an artist that has freed himself from any limits that people have tried to put on him. It also shows the evolution of Ghetts and how he’s worked his way up to this moment and that it has finally paid off.

Fav Tracks: Fine Wine, Mozambique, Fire and Brimstone, Hop Out. IC3, Autobiography, Proud Family, Skengman, No Mercy, Crud

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kaibutsushidousha · 7 years

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What is the type of characters that you hate? (Feel free to show examples)

Now that’s a really interesting ask. I never expect I would ever get to talk in lenght about the concept of character hate and that’s a really fun subject to tackle. The read more here is because the answer is very, very long, not because it has explicit V3 spoilers. It does have chapter 1 spoilers, but only at the last paragraph and with a warning beforehand.

There’s not really any “type” of characters I inherently hate. It’s difficult to create something completely original when almost everything have already been done, so all characters tend to fit into archetypes, but any mildly competent writer will make their character grow beyond their archetype. Of course, I’m not saying it’s not impossible to create unique characters. Iruma, for example, is a character I can’t think of any character similar to her. It also doubles as an example of how this sort of uniqueness doesn’t make your character automatically good.

Anyways, as you want examples, my approach to this question is to name 4 archetypes I dislike, give examples of good characters who overcame their unlikable archetype and tell how them did. But before that I’ll have to say that bad archetypes never make me truly hate a character. When I see a character on an archetype I don’t like, I just don’t care about the character initially. I can’t bring myself to hate it because I believe in the character’s potential to become much more than what they were introduced at. And if they don’t by the end of the story, I have no reason to start caring about them now of all times. After I’m done with this for bad archetype examples, I tell you what you need to really make me hate a character.

Example 1) I don’t like rude/brute characters, specially when they are not villains. This is very broad and nearly omnipresent, so it’s hard to think of specific examples, so let’s go with the basic DanganRonpa. The brutest characters in the franchise are Oowada, Kuzuryuu, Owari, Sakakura and Momota. I’m not counting Iruma here because is a completely different brand of rude. I also don’t think I need to talk about Sakakura because almost every reacted to him the same way I did, so we’re left with the other 4.

Out of all of them, I feel like Owari is the only one who didn’t manage to grow over her archetype. In fact, I feel like her further character construction only made her worse, for reasons I talked about just yesterday. Oowada and Kuzuryuu however, managed to become one of my favorite characters of their respective games. Momota didn’t go that far, but he is pretty good too.

Oowada is definitely brute and angry and it shows, but he is ultimately a character defined by his inner weakness and put directly into constract against the small and frail Fujisaki’s courage and the breaking point of his story comes from internally admiting defeat against Fujisaki. The tropes I don’t like were put into good use and resulted into a brilliant and emotionally strong story that would be impossible without it.

Kuzuryuu earned mostly by being a character defined by his kindness and how that contrasts with the position he is supposed to fill, but I’ll go in more detail about him when I talk about Peko.

Momota is the least good out of the three, mostly because he doesn’t stray too far from the hero archetype, although he is well used in the good parts of it (mainly being inspirational) and gets a lot of character value out of his interactions with Ouma.

Example 2) Blindly obedient characters. Usually soldiers and maids. This terrible archetype is an easy excuse to make a character’s motivations less personal and they very often tend to feel emotionless. DanganRonpa has easy and convenient examples of characters who didn’t grow beyond the archetype in, you guessed it by the second sentence in the example, Mukuro and Toujou. For the good examples of this, I’ll go with Hisui from Tsukihime and, as I mentioned before, Peko.

Hisui is a character very frequently described by Shiki’s narration as emotionless and machine-like at first, but we as her character is further constructed, we learn that that’s not how she naturally acts and she has very emotinally impactful reasons to act like that. Not to mention she is a central part of Kohaku’s (my favorite character ever) motivations, so I’m naturally inclined to like her by proxy as well.

Peko is most likely the most interesting example in this entire list because the great writing rised a character to my overall top 10 favs at the time(currently still on the 11-20 line) by making good use of archetypical tropes I usually hate. Sure, she was initially present as a type of character I like a lot with only a last minute reveal that she was the archetype I don’t like, but her situation as part of this archetype only made her character extremely better. Peko avoids the pitfalls of the emotionless servant and takes a very unique and unusual twist on the archetype by being the blindly obedient servant of someone who really doesn’t want a blindly obedient servant. As she takes no orders from Kuzuryuu, she has to act based on what she thinks Kuzuryuu wants and she can be wrong about it, as her chapter is a huge evidence of. Her being forced to interpret Kuzuryuu is even more excellent due to what makes Kuzuryuu himself great on his own. Kuzuryuu is defined as someone who is too kind to be a yakuza boss but still has to fill that role while maintaining the image and reputation that clashes with his essence and that conflict is passed down to Peko as well, because she is very aware of that and has to choose between acting based on the wants of who Kuzuryuu truly is or who Kuzuryuu is trying to be. Every single part of Peko’s writing is genius.

3) Yanderes. This one should be self-explanatory, but also come as surprise due to my love for many other obsessive characters. Yanderes are bad because their obsession is specifically with love and their definition of love is completely different from mine. Yanderes are usually associated with a possessive and jealous personality that wants to keep the target only for themselves regardless of how they feel about it. I see love in many definitions, but mainly as being happy with someone else’s happiness, so I think love-centric characters should be selflessly dedicated to make the “target” happy. I’m a huge sucker for characters in one-sided relationships who support their target in a two-sided with someone else and that’s the main reason I tend to say I prefer one-sided shipps (provided the target doesn’t hate the character in love).

Examples of yanderes I like include Sakura Matou from Fate/stay Night and Mikan Tsumiki. Both have superb backstories establishing them as emotionally dependant, their dependancy is not limited to their yandere traits and their properly treat as creepy, if not outright evil for this behaviour. Bonus points for Sakura for being a rare case were an eroge heroine is the main villain of her own route.

As much as I don’t want to compliment Idol Death Game TV, Rito Karasuma from it and Mukae Emukae from Medaka Box are also excellent example of likable yanderes for a different reason. They both are extremely obsessive but they lack the possessiveness that make yanderes suck. On the contrary, they agree with me on what love should be like and are insanely dedicated to their target’s happiness.

Rito takes part on the Dream of Dream not to win, but to make Ayaka win, because she strongly believes Ayaka is the best idol ever, so everyone else should also get to see how great she is and admire her as much as Rito does. Even after she discovers this actually a death game, she still focused only on making Ayaka win and is perfectly willing to give up her own life for it. Rito’s smile in her route’s secret ending when you make Ayaka win is easily one of the best moments in that shitty game. Rito’s character as whole is a great treasure found in a garbage pit.

As for Emukae, she gets a great character arc about her learning more about Zenkichi’s character during their times together and ultimately decided to support him in his relationship with Medaka. She is exactly the type of character I described here above.

As exemplified with those two, yandere and blindly obedient servant are two archetypes I really dislike, but they go extremely well together, almost completely compensating for each others flaws. The yandere being dedicated to target’s wants eliminates the unlikable possessivity elements and the obsessive yandere passion eliminates the emotionlessness factor and makes the servant character motivations extremely personal. Not to mention the extent of the yandere’s dedication leads to awesome feats like Rito’s “Ayaka-chan is too nervous to perform this show, I should burn the closest building to cancel it” moment and Emukae’s first confession to Zenkichi, which is easily Medaka Box’s most iconic page and my go-to example for when people ask me what Medaka Box is like.

4) Self-insert characters. I never felt like any narrative ever benefitted from immersion or generic “relatability” (relatibility to more unique personal experiences is a different matter though) and that feels like a really lazy excuse not to write your protagonist. There’s really no saving this one, but I really love characters who look like self-inserts at first but then are revealed not to be. The first examples that come to mind are Hajime Hinata, Souta Mizushino from Re:Creators, Shirou Emiya and Shiki Toono from Type-Moon and to some extent Kaede Akamatsu as well.

Proper self-inserts are never good, but they can be at least tolerable if they are being used to make a point. For example, Naegi is literally anyone to push the idea that literally anyone can defeat despair if they are at least a bit optimistic, or Ritsuka Fujimaru is a stand-in for humanity because Fate/Grand Order is a story about celebrating humanity throughout history and about humanity as species surpassing its challenges.

Now let’s move on to what makes me hate a character. As I said, if the character is part of an archetype I dislike and don’t go into a likable direction, I’ll just not care about them, so how do you make me hate a character? Easy, you first bring me to care about the character then take them in a completely unlikable and disappointing direction. Almost all of the characters I truly hate are characters I used to love at some point. If you have been following my blog for a long time, you saw it happen with Angie and Shinguuji. Giving a TLDR answer to the initial question, the type of I character I can hate is: the type of character I can like.

Now let’s move to the example part, let’s give 3 examples of really awful directions you can take your character.

1) Make your character have completely stupid, unreasonable and poorly justified actions and make them to central and relevant to the character to ignore. As for examples, we have the aforementioned Shinguuji and Angie, both who I already explained about.

2) Center your character around a mystery and give that mystery a really underwhelming answer and reveal it in a uncerimonious way that feels like it never really mattered to begin with, then make it never centrally relevant to the character.

An example of this character anti-climax is Phi from Zero Escape. She clearly knows a lot more than she should and seems very involved with the plot, but we can never know exactly why because of VLR’s terrible decision of making the ending a complete sequel hook. Next game, Phi is completely sidelined, the answer to her mystery is revealed (technically) without her presence, it more about Delta than about her even thought she had an entire game of pointless build-up about it, we never get a scene of her reacting to it nor her relation to Delta ever matters to ever matter to anything.

3) Suddenly throw your character into an archetype I dislike. Obviously Peko is an exception to that and is the only one remember right now.

An example where it didn’t benefit the character is Arcueid Brunestud from Tsukihime. Arc is really great in her own route. She is a fun airhead, smart and badass when needed, has a good character arc about her growing humanity and a great dynamic with Shiki. Then the next route we play is Ciel’s. There we see how Arcueid is like when she doesn’t have Shiki’s preference and, guess what, she turns out have been a possessive yandere all along. An overpowered possessive yandere who usurps the role of final boss of the route when it should be Shiki and Ciel’s histories as Roa. I’m glad we never get to see her in any of the next routes.

Another very interesting example is Akane Kurashiki from the Zero Escape escape series, because she incorporates multiples of the 3 examples above at the same, shows how not even my absolute favs are safe from dropping with further characterization and how recovery is always possible down the line.

After I finished 999, I loved Akane’s character to the point she rose to becoming my overall second favorite character. Then we got the unfortunate sequel that was Virtue’s Last Reward. There Akane is quite different. She is not a servant character but she has the exact same problems I have with them. Her very personal story from 999 is replaced with a very unpersonal “save the world” storyline and she acts completely emotionless, even to Junpei, to the point it feels like her fun personality from 999 was just an act to get Junpei to work the way he needed to. (Example 3)

At the end of the game, we get also get some final exposition from Junpei saying that all timelines still exists, his times with Quark will still remain some even if that idea of creating a “perfect timeline“ goes right. What does that mean for Akane’s character? It means she her “heroic“ efforts to fix her history are acutally just her cowardly running away to a different timeline while leaving another version of herself to suffer in the bad timeline instead. That makes her actions not only unpersonal but also unadmirable. (Example 1)

Next we get ZTD, who brings back Akane with her fun teasing personality from the first game and also showing the process of how she steeled herself to become her VLR self, not only confirming the parts I liked about her were a genuine part of her character but also justifying the parts I don’t like, completely solving the example 3 problem. The example 1 part is not solved but it’s acknowledged, questioned and actually has the characters feeling like dicks at some moments for randomly putting their other selves to death. That was enough for me to grow attached to Akane’s character again. She didn’t go back to second spot, but she’s now most likely around 20-30, which is pretty good all things considered.

Well, this is an ask about character hatred, so I think I should talk a bit about the final boss of the characters I hate, a character fits in all of the three examples above simultaneously and didn’t get the redemption Akane did: Kyouko Kirigiri.

In chapter 6, we start things off with a really uncerimonious reveal that Kirigiri’s talent was actually the most obvious guess imaginable (Example 2). Ok, that’s actually not that bad and we get to hear more about this when she talks about Jin. Jin was, in her own words, talented as detective but that was not something he really wanted to do, so everyone in the family unfairly considered him a failure, including herself (starting to dip a bit into Example 1 territory but not quite, Kyouko has the right to be biased in this situation). Kyouko, however, say she is glad she was abandoned because she was proud of her detective carrer and makes a little speech about a detective’s duty of being impartial (Example 3 into the servant character archetype with her being blindly obedient to Kirigiri family, with an extra dose of unpersonal and emotionless because she is actively enforcing neutrality, along with a bit of Example 1 because the focus on impartiality contradicts the family’s biased attitude towards Jin). Last she says she didn’t hate him for abandoning her, she hated because the rest of her shitty family would constantly treat her with pity for being abandoned, which is something completely beyond his control (Example 1 amplified by the fact the neutrality speech a couple lines ago was Kyouko completely relinquishing her right to be biased). That’s all not even considering the very strong implications that Jin was kicked out of the family (which was apparently confirmed by DRK, but we’ll never know how canon that was). It was actually amazing how managed to hit all the points that mostly make me hate a character with only one single scene.

That’s all about the characters I hate, but now I want to talk about something extra regarding an interesting experience I had with character hate as a concept and how it works on different ways for everyone. That’s the part with V3 spoilers.

This is actually about Kaede Akamatsu and how she is received by the fandom. I saw some person complaining about the chapter 1 twist and decided to discuss with them about. This turned into a very, very long discussion about Akamatsu’s character and the direction it took. Before that conversation I was a little bit disdainful of Akamatsu fans who hated the twist, but it felt like they didn’t like the character for who she else, but for what they were expecting her to be. While talking about for hours with a person I deemed a bad Akamatsu “fan”, I came to feel like if I wasn’t the huge of fan of mystery narrator murders I am, Akamatsu could very well fall into my hated character list. The person I was talking to described exactly what happens when I grow to hate a character and yet he was still claiming to love her character. That gave me a lot of thought about how people consume media in different ways and have different factors to define what they like or hate. That guy was most likely the reason why this answer turned to so long.

I guess what I’m trying to say with this last thing is that media consumption is always a personal experience and my way of evaluting characters might or might not apply to how you enjoy things, so you don’t have to think my method is right and all others is wrong. Whether you’re liking or hating characters, decide this in a way that works naturally for you and don’t criticize others for experiencing fiction in different ways.

#I can't believe an ask about character hate turned into such a pleasant write and one of my answers I am the most proud of #should I tag the characters or not?#character hate

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