In rap music, the album has become a hurdle. You can count on one hand the rappers who can accomplish the following two feats: getting a label to release an album, and having that album be good enough that fans aren’t imagining the ways in which it could have been more like the artist’s previous—usually more unfettered and pure—work. In the increasingly fraught journey from underground to mainstream, no time is more uncertain than when mixtapes and EPs must finally become an album. You get one or maybe two shots to prove your staying—and earning—power before your resources get shifted to the next dude with a few radio hits or a small but growing fanbase. It is a grim and unfair reality, and on his major label debut album Mr. Wonderful, Queens jester Action Bronson more or less flips his middle finger at it—an admirable response, though ultimately unsuccessful.
Consider that the first time we hear Bronson’s voice, he is singing in an exaggerated off-key warble. The song falls apart twice, with Bronson cursing that he can't get his vocals right. The moment feels like a rejection of the idea that a major-label debut needs to be a no-nonsense statement to be remembered for decades. In theory, this approach would be refreshing, and if any rapper could let the attendant album pressure roll right off his back, it’s Bronson, who inhabits a character whose reality bares little resemblance to his—or our—own. Yet those atonal vocals end up feeling like a warning sign that Bronson is not going to upend the way rappers make their debut albums. Instead, it turns out, he’s just going to derail his own.
Those nagging vocals—the kind of singing you do to momentarily piss off your significant other—not only embody the spirit of the album, but they conveniently highlight exactly when and where Mr. Wonderful falls apart. After an opening handful of tracks that sound reliably like Action Bronson songs—with a few noticeably ritzy, retro-soul productions—the album shifts into a suite introduced by "THUG LOVE STORY 2017 THE MUSICAL (Interlude)", a sketch in which an older man sings to Bronson about a lost love who disappeared from the streets.
What follows is a musical of sorts wedged into the gut of the album, with Bronson continuing the story of a runaway girl who has left the protagonist brokenhearted. On "City Boy Blues", Bronson fashions himself as a bluesman, singing and mumbling over a jazz-bar instrumental. Next is "A Light in the Addict", a maudlin and forgettable song made with longtime collaborator Party Supplies that features an unnecessary multiple-minute piano outro. It’s all wrapped up by "Baby Blue", in which Bronson kisses the woman off with those same whining vocals, over a Mark Ronson production that could have fit on an Amy Winehouse album.
This digression is conceptually ambitious, but the execution seems to purposefully undercut the exercise, as if the suite was the result of an argument between a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other about what the album should accomplish that was won by neither. When Chance the Rapper shows up at the end of "Baby Blue" with a verse of playfully inconsequential insults—"I hope every soda you drink already shaken up," "I hope the zipper on your jacket get stuck"—before admitting he hopes his heartbreaker is still happy, he pulls off in half a minute what Bronson couldn’t in fifteen: using an imagined story to reveal humanity through humor.
Bronson, it should be noted, has hit that note before. "THUG LOVE STORY 2017 THE MUSICAL (Interlude)" is a callback to "Thug Love Story 2012", a standout from his still-excellent mixtape Blue Chips. That song was connected to the multi-character track "Hookers at the Point", inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name, in which Bronson rapped in different voices from the points of view of a pimp, prostitute and john, in the process showing that he could consider and illuminate the world outside of his own head. Those two songs felt almost effortless in their construction, while the suite inside Mr. Wonderful feels at once belabored and half-assed.
From there, the album closes with a whimper. Party Supplies, Bronson’s most reliable partner, is brought back again on "Only in America", a track with a classic-rock guitar riff that feels like an inadequate sequel to the duo’s fantastic jukebox rap trifle "Contemporary Man". A few tracks later, there is a live recording of a meandering new song called "The Passage"—if you can figure out the purpose of its inclusion you will have gotten further than me.
Amidst all this are a few tracks—"Terry", "Actin Crazy", "Galactic Love"—featuring Bronson spitting fantastical bullshit over laidback beats. This is where he is at his most natural, approachable, and likeable, dotting his world-traveling fantasies with the names of gourmet foods. Instead of slicing at convention, Bronson accepts it—bringing himself back to square one, which Mr. Wonderful argues, was a pretty fine place after all.
