Hopsin—the California rapper whose constricting flows and humorless turns suck all the fun out of rapping—made his reputation appealing to the angstier corners of the internet, inhabited by rap moralists and “alternative thinkers”—those who earnestly think Tech N9ne is Peak Underground Rap. His new album, No Shame, is a bitter, petulant response to recent setbacks and mistakes: the collapse of his Funk Volume label, the souring of personal and professional relationships, and losing custody of his son after pleading guilty to assault. But he refuses to back down. “I built this empire off rebellion/Niggas seem to have a problem with what I be sellin’,” he raps on “Panorama City,” a song using a “California Love” sample as a Thug Life signifier. When given the chance to explain himself, he doubles down on the worst aspects of an irritating persona.
No Shame is a misfired revenge stunt. He takes aim at several targets and whiffs spectacularly, producing the worst album of his career, filled with tryhard wordplay and defamation that verges on abuse. “This album is backlash for somebody else. This album is pretty much just karma for people who have screwed me over or done something wrong to me,” he told Tim Westwood. Those people are his former business partner, manager, and Funk Volume co-founder, Damien Ritter, and his ex-girlfriend, who Hopsin was arrested for assaulting in Australia last year. The barbs he has for Ritter are boring enough, but those reserved for his ex are particularly dark.
Hopsin leaves no room for interpretation: He uses No Shame (and the press tour promoting it) to get back at the mother of his child, to damage her any way he can: “I fuckin’ hate this bitch, her name could sit on a grave/Only reason she ain’t dead is ‘cause my kid on the way/The bitch is pregnant and she strippin’, dodgin’ minimum wage/She done kick me down, locked me up, and spit on my face,” he raps, enraged on “All Your Fault (Remix).” This is a rapper using the full weight of his musical machine to discredit a woman he pled guilty to assaulting. And even for all his attempts to disgrace and humiliate her, smearing her with slut-shaming tactics and leveraging the entire force of his fan base against her, he still comes off looking much worse.
Hopsin takes pride in his writing, making fun of “mumble rappers” and those he perceives to be lesser lyricists, but his ideas are always articulated in the most corrosive ways possible; his set-ups and images are awkward, distasteful, and off-putting. Creepiness is an important part of his aesthetic—the colored contact lenses, deranged rambler rhyme mechanics (a la Eminem), and so-sinister-they’re-campy performances are all tools he uses to paint himself as a rap iconoclast. But even he pushes the limits of likability on No Shame. Slim Shady is his patron saint, and “Rap God” is his scripture. All of his defining principles originate there, only executed without grace or guile. Even his horrible, vitriolic anti-ex tirades are cribbed right from the “Kim” playbook. Rage isn’t a substitute for artistry.
He’ll rap nonsense for the sake of the scheme (”Napalm in my dang palm/I’m a dark villain like Blade, Spawn, or Akon with a cape on”). His scenes are insipid. His phrasings are either basic and unsophisticated or simply unnatural, playing up the phonetics as a distraction. “Evil and purgin’, I am more deceiving in person/Screamin’ and cursin’, fuck the world with penis insertions/I’ma feel this way until the day I’m leavin’ this Earth, man,” he raps on “Witch Doctor.” You can almost hear him asking himself, “what rhymes with this?” making raps purposelessly denser with complete disregard for syntax.
The songs that aren’t vehicles for his hatred are pointless exercises, each an elaborate convolution. Most Hopsin verses are assembled the same way, with choppy, rapid-fire cadences of multisyllabic filler. Every diphthong and accent ricochets off the next, creating the illusion of mastery when really, it’s less complex than letting an algorithm generate raps from scratch. There’s no value in craftsmanship alone; there has to be flow, direction, and meaning. “Rap monster, Black Mamba/You can’t run from the wrath I’ve been asked to cast on ya/To all the haters who been keepin’ up with my every move/Here’s my penis to latch on/I’m the only MC in this wack genre,” he raps, following his technicality-first formula.
And if there was any doubt that he’s detrimentally a creature of habit, he’s now nine songs deep in an “Ill Mind of Hopsin” series that ran out of ideas four songs ago. Things get even more unpleasant when Hopsin takes detours. On “Happy Ending,” he raps about getting off at a massage parlor in a terrible mock accent, mimicking the masseuse for the hook: “If you no say nothing, I can give you sucky-sucky.” It would be one thing if the song was just crude or offensive or unlistenable, but it’s a trifecta.
There aren’t any moments of remorse or thoughtfulness on No Shame, but there are a few moments of reflection. “I don’t like Marcus, I don’t like Hopsin/I am ashamed of them both,” he raps on “Marcus’ Gospel” before concluding, “I made my bed, I’ma lay in it.” These bars would have you believe Hopsin has learned from his mistakes. But No Shame proves otherwise. The album rebukes any and all responsibility for his current predicament, shifting blame onto others. And in an attempt to weaponize his raps against his adversaries, he exposes his deepest flaws. His album is a reminder that shame is a productive and even necessary thing, keeping us from further making fools of ourselves.
