Joe Budden has defined himself as an intensely emotional tough guy who has never stopped putting everything out there, but the New Jersey rapper’s best music has frequently cut inward. Throughout his Mood Muzik mixtape-series-turned-brand, Budden has picked at and peeled away his depression, addiction, and the many embarrassments he’s collected as an eager public figure. When he’s down, he opens up.
In many ways Budden is an under-acknowledged trailblazer of hip-hop’s 21st century relationship with the Internet, ahead of his time in living for and through the web as much as alongside it. He nurtured his online fans before it was an obvious play, earning and grooming a cult following of lyric-obsessed hip-hop heads, some of whom prize his legitimate emo leanings, and some who just love bars.
On his new album, Rage & the Machine, Budden’s music is less moody but as densely lyrical as ever. His raps have long leaned on the preferred devices of the competitive lyricism he exemplifies: puns, metaphors, clever topicality. “I used to drive around the tunnel in a Lexus with a snub/Before Power 105 was sneaking breakfast in the club,” he raps on “Uncle Joe,” a track that plays on his preferred trope of bitter contempt for the current state of hip-hop.
The record is produced almost entirely by the Providence beatmaker AraabMUZIK, a 27-year-old whose pyrotechnic pad-smashing earned him viral YouTube fame as an MPC whiz. AraabMUZIK, whose given name is Abraham Orellana, has been generously collaborative and experimental, producing for the Diplomats and many others in a meandering career. Unfortunately, Rage & the Machine skips over Orellana’s most interesting inclinations—forward-looking fusions of electronic, dance, and street hip-hop—in favor of his most traditional ones, an unfortunate fit for Budden’s reductionist New York rap nostalgia.
AraabMUZIK isn’t the type to dwell on a beat, and has established a formula of programming drums that is both finicky and mechanical. On a song like “Flex,” a conspicuous lead single that features Fabolous and Tory Lanez, he piles drum sounds onto each other expertly before haphazardly triggering a sample atop. With a breathless, high-word-count approach to lyricism, Budden benefits from the boxed-in nature of AraabMUZIK percussion, which give him a wall to push against. “Forget” is one of the best bits of matchmaking, a short, verse-only ramble on a boom bap 2.0 beat that lets both artists play to their talents. “I Gotta Ask” is a committed Jay Z homage; instead of an Annie number, !llmind flips a Sondheim stage song into similarly whimsical territory. Budden adopts Jay’s cadence to run down his preferred list of boasts and persistent complaints.
Elsewhere, some songs arrive a little late to the party in borrowed clothes. “I Wanna Know” samples a Manhattans loop which was also the thrust of a standout Madlib beat on Freddie Gibbs’ 2014 breakout album Piñata. Sample recycling might not be the faux pas it once was in hip-hop—Madlib himself wasn’t the first to pull this record—but AraabMUZIK’s simple chop and pitch-up make it feel like a blatant beatjack. On a separate song, a separate infraction: “Time for Work” has a hook sung by Emanny that he must have written while listening to Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ’Em,” because the melody is all but the same. More generally, Budden has struggled with making catchy songs and this album carries a couple clunkers with gawky hooks.
To the rapper’s credit, Rage & the Machine is one of his more accessible records, less emotionally insular than usual, but perhaps a little cold for that reason. It’s not a redesign as much as a measured refinement. There’s a fan service aspect to Budden’s music by now that hinges on his fixed audience. “What you expecting from me?/Why else you checking for me?,” the singer Jazzy wonders on a track called “By Law.” If you’re listening to a Joe Budden album in 2016, you probably already know what you’re in for.
