Asher Roth soundtracked a generation of sweaty basements’ Thirsty Thursdays; now he stuffs his songs with asides about Senate reform and garbled philosophical platitudes. “If heaven closed its gates and hell was broke/And all you had was every day you woke/Would you be hella woke?” he asks on his new album’s first track. If you answered yes, you’re in for a treat—welcome to Asher Roth’s wokeness parade, where he fumbles towards opinions on: gluten consumption, baby boomers, climate change, marijuana decriminalization, the American healthcare system, and mortgage interest rates. “I think there’s too many men,” he announces on the cringely titled “Cher in Chernobyl,” a stubbornly unself-aware bid at feminism from the guy whose most rousing commitment to gender equality used to be chanting that he loved women just as much as he loved drinking. Even the album title is a self-congratulatory bastardization of gender politics—Asher Roth’s girlfriend brings him flowers, we learn on the title track. Please clap.
Maybe we should credit Roth for attempting growth at all. Nearly every album of his since Asleep in the Bread Aisle has both tried to inch away from and capitulated to the formula that launched his career: half-baked rhymes about Banker’s Club and keg stands, belched over wobbly bass. If Asher Roth didn’t create frat rap, he at least directly inspired a new strain of it—Sammy Adams, best known for a thrashing song that rhymed “Vegas” and “Jager,” got a record deal after remixing “I Love College.” Hoodie Allen grunted diatribes about sororities over drum kicks and now tours across campuses. The grunting, pastel-shorts aesthetics of frat rap have burbled beyond colleges. Lil Dicky has a TV show and a billboard in Times Square; weeks ago, two TikTok stars apparently paid some ungodly amount of money to mercenary producers to manufacture a “diss track,” their sneers and intonations carved in Roth’s image. Roth’s legacy, with all its thoughtless misogyny and beer-bong coveting, is the reason he can get Lil Yachty to come gurgle a guest verse a decade after “I Love College.” But it’s also why his new political posing, however well-intentioned it may be, is so hard to take seriously.
“I’m every shared experience/I’m serious, I’m kidding,” Roth raps on the album’s opener, which doesn’t do much to clarify whether the album is an earnest proclamation of the rapper’s politics or one long, excruciating bit. Either way, Flowers’ most firm commitment is to bludgeoning language and logic. “I’ve had to learn to relent/To relearn how to vent/Scent is certainly concerning/Gotta learn to ascend,” Roth babbles at one point; “Got gluten in your doo doo,” he warbles at another. On “Back of the Classroom,” an attempt to appease whoever’s skipping through the album until they hear a college reference, his frenetic flow is a dead ringer for Hoodie Allen’s, a kind of snake-eats-tail moment of frat-rap synchronicity.
The production alternates between grating open-mic-night theatrics—clanging cymbals, cloying bursts of trumpet, audible whoops—and plodding drums. Saxophones bleat; a ukulele plunks along. “Dark Chocolate” emerges out of this murk, a total surprise of contorting guitar riffs and reverberating synths in which Asher Roth strains for a falsetto and doesn’t rap once. The song seems like his take on Tame Impala, and while the track isn’t entirely unpleasant, it’s jarringly out of place, like a church organ rolled on stage at a Pitbull concert.
Throughout the album, Asher Roth goes out of his way to reference his age. He groans that his back hurts. He moans that he’s been “doing this” for so long. At 34, he could have believably crammed the record with canned, beer-sloshed party stories; it’s telling of Asher, or maybe of the world right now, that his brags center on reading about private prisons, not on sex or shots or drugs. Still, these songs are frictionless and forgettable. You almost want him to have gotten his wish—to stay in college forever, where at least he could pretend to have fun.
