F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel The Beautiful and Damned follows socialite Anthony Patch, the heir to a large fortune, through his courtship with aspiring actress Gloria Gilbert. As his prosperity leads to alcoholism, the book explores how hard it is to love selfishly, how partying and drug abuse become escapes from grappling with one’s own flaws. “Here’s to alcohol, the rose-colored glasses of life,” the story famously posits. G-Eazy’s The Beautiful & Damned has a nearly identical arc, with Eazy playing the same type of sad, rich playboy. He’s constantly searching for meaning in luxury. In intent and tone, G-Eazy’s self-indulgent downer raps about depravity and excess seem to embody another Fitzgerald line: “I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
G-Eazy is a career hedonist flirting dangerously close to nihilism. As a wannabe greaser sampling doo-wop, he ascended quickly through the rap ranks, and now he doesn't quite know what to make of his newfound fame. His last album, 2015’s When It’s Dark Out, was humorless and self-serious, trying desperately to find purpose in stardom but coming up empty. The new one is even darker and more cynical. On the cover, his jet-black hair is disheveled, his shirt bloodied, his face bruised and half-covered in shadow. This is the reckoning of a Bad Boy. It becomes “Sad Boy”: The Album, where G-Eazy is his own worst enemy. “Gerald what the fuck is wrong, man?” he asks himself on that song. “Cheer the fuck up, you asshole.”
The Beautiful & Damned is a boozy, minor-key, 74-minute slog, where he wonders if it’s possible to survive the corrupting influence of celebrity. When everything is easy to get, does it all mean less? And does becoming numb to it all make you a bad person? The title track suggests yes: “This is everything that comes with celebrity/Criticism, ridicule and the scrutiny… And it’s none of y’alls business, truthfully/You don’t know ‘bout the fame, what it do to me/I’m talking to myself like every night: ‘You could try to be a better guy.’” It’s meant as a cautionary tale: Being famous isn’t all it seems, kids. But it’s hard to take G-Eazy as seriously as he takes himself when he’s earnestly rehashing every Hollywood cliché in the most basic way possible. His raps sound forced; the production is gloomy and monotonous. There are no insights to be found here about prestige, depression, or dependency. The whole thing is unbelievably dour and boring.
G-Eazy typically raps the simplest version of any given idea and he rarely looks beyond himself. All of his stories have the same destination: trashed hotel rooms mid come-down, women identified only as groupies strewn across unmade beds, silence his only companion. These are tales seeking sympathy for a lonely drunken womanizer. By the time Charlie Puth arrives for his turn on the carousel, on a song literally called “Sober,” the Oakland rapper has worn out every possible variation of his affectless shtick.
As the title implies, The Beautiful & Damned is supposed to explore a duality, G-Eazy’s status as a Gemini, “Angel, Devil, it's both him and I,” as he sees it. But in the process of painting himself as a conflicted man tortured by the same fame he craves, Eazy somehow only sees things as binary. Every thrill inevitably brings pain and nothing else. There are only saints and sinners, good girls and bad boys (“Mama Always Told Me”). On “Summer in December,” he associates winter with melancholy, rendering Los Angeles as a sunny year-round paradise where (surprise!) he can’t be sad: “The girls are pretty, the sun will shine 360 days/But I don’t always feel that way, today I need some gray.” Raging alcoholism, drug addiction, and lechery are cast against a Hollywood backdrop in a rap noir drama, where every moment of pleasure comes with an immediate consequence. But the only real tragedy is how flavorless his raps are and how lifeless and monochrome his perspective is. His writing is crude, and his lack of nuance makes the album sound short-sighted and self-absorbed.
A rambling monologist, G-Eazy uses his fame as an excuse to be selfish and thoughtless across The Beautiful & Damned. His characters are faceless and one-dimensional (“And I just broke up with my female/On tour, had to do it by email”), set pieces in an isolating relational crisis. Even on his Halsey duet, “Him & I,” he only thinks about his girlfriend as an extension of himself—the Bonnie to his Clyde, the only person that gets him, his soldier, willing to stand by him no matter what. There is no depth to his relations with the people around him. It isn’t just that he sounds so miserable rapping about flying women out and watching them do coke; he doesn’t even really know why he’s miserable, and he never tries to find out. Everything happens without purpose, as he puts it on “The Plan,” “I do this shit ‘cause I can.” His reaches are painful, obvious, and usually obnoxious. Only A$AP Rocky and Cardi B can save him, on the hit “No Limit.” He has so little to say about what it means to be famous and overwhelmed, or worse, famous and still hurting. And he knows even less about suffering from success than DJ Khaled. His is an extremely pessimistic outlook. Amid the myopia, the constant navel-gazing, and the show biz boilerplates, his contemptuous takes on stardom ultimately prove to be hollow.
