My Gut Reaction: Royce da 5'9" - Layers (April 15, 2016)

Even though I keep claiming that Ryan “Royce da 5’9” Montgomery is one of my favorite artists out, I sure as hell am behind on his catalog. I have no excuse for this, really: whenever I hear that he has something new coming down the pike, I get excited, but once I have it in my hands (or, more realistically, on my phone), I become fickle, choosing to listen to other shit I know I’ll enjoy, inadvertently saving Ryan’s projects for this very site. There’s no rhyme or reason behind this: I’ve listened to both PRhyme albums (Ryan’s side group with DJ Premier), his Bad Meets Evil EP (his project with fellow Detroit dictionary connoisseur Eminem) and each official Slaughterhouse release (his former supergroup, featuring him alongside Crooked I, Joell Ortiz, and professional podcaster Joe Budden) rather quickly, and yet the last Royce solo album I wrote about, Success Is Certain, didn’t even grace my ears until seven years after its release. God, I suck.

At least I’m only two years behind on Layers, the man’s sixth attempt at justifying his continued excursion into hip hop as a solo artist.

During the nearly five years between Success Is Certain (itself a sequel to his sophomore effort, Death Is Certain) and Layers, Ryan dropped both PRhyme albums and Slaughterhouse’s major label debut, Welcome To: Our House, which remains, to date, the crew’s only project for Shady Records, as the label still holds the quartet’s follow-up, Glass House, which will likely never see a proper release. Five years is a significant amount of time, enough for an artist to hone their writing skills and segue into being a storyteller, as opposed to remaining just a shit-talker, which is exactly the direction Royce found his career taking. Layers is ultimately a collection of tales Ryan weaves, some of which were taken directly from his life, while others fall into more of a “morality tale” category, but before you balk at that description, remember that Royce da 5’9” is an extraordinary shit-talker, his boasts and threats honed by his experiences in the streets of Motown, so this progression is not only unsurprising, it’s expected, at least in order for the man to have a thriving career.

Layers was released in 2016 by Ryan’s own label, Bad Half Entertainment, named after his Bad Meets Evil project with Marshall Mathers. It was met with critical acclaim, and the general consensus is that it’s a decent album. Ryan signed up D-12’s Kon Artis, who would rather go by the pseudonym Mr. Porter now, to executive-produce the project, which generally means he provided some beats while helping our host with shaping the overall sound of Layers to mirror the way he saw the album in his head. The production not handled by Mr. Porter comes from folks such as Nottz, DJ Khalil, S1, and, fascinatingly, Antman Wonder, whose other work DJ Premier famously chopped up and sampled to craft the beats for the second PRhyme project.

Layers finds Royce da 5’9” as an artist who is fully aware that he isn’t a young man anymore, and as such, his foolish shenanigans and actions have unintended consequences. But with age comes sobriety, experience, and wisdom, and Ryan still isn’t fucking around when it comes to that microphone: it’s just that now he has much more to say than he may have in the past, when he was toiling away as a ghostwriter for the likes of Dr. Dre and Puff Daddy, hoping that he would get another shot at a solo career after his debut, Rock City, crashed and burned even with the assistance of Eminem.

It’s fair to say that Royce has done just fine since Rock City. Besides, his story would be boring as hell if he had struck gold on his very first try, right?

1. TABERNACLE

No rap album intro here: Ryan immediately launches into the true tale of the most important day in his life once the S1 and J. Rhodes beat sets the stage. After a modicum of background regarding his childhood, our host goes to great length to describe, in vivid detail, the day in question. As a writer, combining your first rap show, your grandmother passing, your first son being born, and meeting the dude who changes your professional life (that would be Marshall Mathers) all into the same day would be considered farfetched and unrealistic. Whether all of this really happened to Royce at the same time isn’t the question, though, and as a rapper and storyteller, he conveys his emotions and state of mind admirably, especially as he realizes that his grandmother lives nowhere near the hospital that she passed away in. The instrumental was good enough to keep the story going, if not truly engaging, but after “Tabernacle”, I’d like to hear Royce reading his own autobiography on Audible very soon, please.

2. PRAY

The last lines our host speaks on “Tabernacle” inform his first bar on “Pray”, a Mr. Porter-produced effort at some social consciousness mixed in with the boasts and bullshit Royce da 5’9” is most known for. And at least on here, that combination doesn’t really work out for him: although his four verses flow effortlessly through the sieve, said beat seems to believe itself to be much more important than it is, as its drums jump in at random intervals to interrupt the proceedings. Ryan also isn’t entirely convincing as a shit-talking Talib Kweli-type, either: the man talks about children being killed by cops (still sadly relevant today) in the same verse where he brags about driving around pacing a gun in the car. I was shaking my head, anyway. I get it, duality of man and all that, but nah.

3. HARD

Runs for nearly six minutes, which is much longer than necessary for our host to get his point across, but otherwise, I kind of dug “Hard”: by including the teacher’s monologue at the beginning of the track, Royce’s admonishment of himself when he sings, “What the fuck was I thinking?” during the hook is both funny and relatable. Ryan’s braggadocio, which, again, is what he’s most known for, is littered around the Antman Wonder production, which shifts gears before the second verse, but is pretty solid throughout. Our host tying together the clashing ideas of how easy this rap shit is for him with how difficulty of a time he had to even get to this point are a rather brilliant juxtaposition, and he manages to sound carefree during the final stanza-slash-monologue even though he’s clearly still affected by the actions of his past, both from others and himself. Not the hardest song out, but it was still pretty nice.

4. STARTERCOAT

Mr. Porter’s instrumental is unconventional and possibly the best I’ve ever heard from him, or at least in his top five, and Ryan builds a two-story single-family five-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath dwelling and straight up lives inside the motherfucker, he sounds that comfortable. Which is why it’s weird that “Startercoat” is about that time in the recent past when everyone was obsessed with owning Starter brand coats, back when they cost over one hundred dollars and weren’t sold at Walmart because people actually cared. I remember having a Dallas Cowboys coat that I stained with red paint roughly four months into owning it. Ah, memories. “Startercoat” is entertaining enough, if a bit empty, but Ryan sounds great, and the artist also known as Kon Artis has certainly come a long way behind the boards.

5. WAIT

A running theme of Layers is Ryan convincing listeners (and, likely, himself) that he deserves to be in the position he’s currently in after having worked hard for years, pitting up with an ever-evolving music industry that cast him aside on more than one occasion. Hence, “Wait”, a Jake One-produced tirade where our host both believes he is important enough to make label executives wait on him to respond (lest that “[rush] excellence”) and is petty enough to shit on everyone from his past that had no faith in his abilities. Royce rides the beat well, and said beat will get an audience amped up sufficiently, but I don’t know, “Wait” left me feeling a bit cold. Ah well.

6. SHINE (SKIT)

…

7. SHINE

Starts off sounding a bit off: Nottz’s beat seems unmastered and incomplete, leaving the track to come across as hollow at first. But, strangely, all of the ingredients come together rather nicely. It helps that Ryan’s singing voice has only improved over the years, and man, is that ever a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever write when I first heard him jump onto the scene. The lo-fi charms of “Shine” help our host unload upon the audience his shit-talk that veers into an, as he puts is, “rags to riches story”, albeit one where he still makes sure to tell you two how much better he is at rapping than your fave ever could be. Not bad at all.

8. LINCOLN (SKIT)

…

9. FLESH

The preceding skit, the lead character from which also opens “Flesh”, was entirely unnecessary, as this DJ Khalil production, which was quite good, focuses on Royce’s trademarked boasts-n-bullshit and observational humor, so I have no clue how any of that shit made the final cut. Still, our host manages to squeeze four verses into a run time of less than four minutes, which is quite the feat. Also an accomplishment in its own right: so far there haven’t been any songs on Layers that I outright hate. Not everything connected with me, but none of the tracks are what I would consider “skippable”, which is fucking amazing. Huh.

10. HELLO (SKIT) (FEAT. MELANIE RUTHERFORD)

As performed in its entirety by Pontiac, Michigan songstress (and frequent Black Milk collaborator) Melanie Rutherford, “Hello (Skit)” shifts the focus of Layers to Ryan’s marriage, a topic he briefly approached toward the very end of “Flesh”. Kudos on the continuity, bro.

11. MISSES (FEAT. K. YOUNG)

Picking up Rutherford’s narrative thread, the DJ Khalil-produced “Misses” finds our host juggling both his wife and his mistress, encountering the type of clichéd scenarios one has seen on television or in movies whenever someone’s doing this shit outside of a porno flick. The presentation is at least interesting, though: with the help of his guest, vocalist K. Young, Ryan’s tales of self-generated woe fly the fuck by, and even that unnecessary Lincoln character is referenced in a slightly useful way, so clearly Royce has some plans for him that hadn’t been telegraphed properly. (Why even introduce a character halfway through the project?) “Misses” isn’t the greatest song ever, and you’ve all heard his not-at-all unique story before (ooh, the side piece ends up pregnant! Ooh, the side piece threatens to contact his wife to spill the beans! None of this is original). But you still wouldn’t turn this shit off.

12. DOPE! (FEAT. LOREN ODEN)

Although the whole “side piece” theme is touched on during the intro, when Ryan reintroduces the Lincoln character into the storyline (and lets him get off a hilarious line about Hot Pockets), “Dope!” takes on an more serious and sinister topic: young men who believe, based on all of the evidence presented to them, that the only way in this country to become rich and successful is to enter the drug game. Ryan’s repetition of the line, “sell dope” grows more and more aggravating throughout, as it does in real life as well…until one bar, when he poses for a picture with a fan (in this fictional narrative, drug dealers have tons of followers, I suppose) but ducks out before the flash goes off because he “forgot [he] had to go sell dope”, which is just a funny visual. The instrumental, provided by DJ Pain 1, is a grower, not a shower, and “Dope!” could be the funniest song of the entire project, which is saying something, considering the dark subject matter.

13. AMERICA

“Dope!” ended with some lines from the “God Bless America” leading into this track. I love it when rappers have a plan for their projects, as opposed to slapping some singles together haphazardly. Anyway, if any of you two readers thought that Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” was unique in any way, well, I’m not sure why you’re reading this blog still, since I’m likely much older than your demographic, but artists have been criticizing our country for-fucking-ever. Ryan throws his hat into the ring, utilizing a Epikh and S1 beat while addressing how those ever-present societal ills (which have only grown worse, by the way) are engineered to cause you to fail and to keep you humble and appreciative for what you do have. It’s a muddled message, to be sure: Ryan touches on how folks aren’t recognized for their work until after they pass, and his attitude toward that conventional way of thinking is, “fuck that shit”, while also questioning how the Unites States is still a functioning country as is. All in all, though, Royce’s clever wordplay and ability to find pockets within the beat where none were sewn in previously help make “America” moving, if not great. Yeah, I just referenced that.

14. LAYERS (FEAT. PUSHA T & RICK ROSS)
Layers has been so consistent in its sound and with Ryan’s performances that I literally only noticed that there hadn’t been any guest spots from other rappers until Pusha Ton opened this title track. He sounded okay, but a little awkward over Mr. Porter’s instrumental, which is much more serene and enveloping than it initially appears. The beat definitely grows on you, though. King Push, Officer Ricky Rozay, and Ryan all talk about the many different “Layers” to their professional lives in the music industry, likely because the word “levels” had already been taken by others, most notably by Ross’ buddy Meek Mill and the late Avicii, but only Willy’s verse is catchy, although Royce comes a close second. At first I wished the music were harder-hitting to complement the guests present, but as “Layers” proceeded I found myself amending that to wish that Royce had either encouraged a more aggressive verse from Push, or a complete replacement. That’s weird coming from me, as I generally like Pusha T quite a bit, but if you know, you know.

15. QUIET (FEAT. TIARA & MR. PORTER)

A late-game banger even with Mr. Porter singing during the hook, it’s that entertaining. Ryan eschews all tenets of social responsibility for a wild braggadocio session, talking his shit alongside guest rapper Tiara, who just so happens to be Porter’s daughter (this makes me feel very old), but you’ll quickly forget that bit of trivia because she sounds pretty fucking good on here. Ryan steals the show, obviously, as it’s his song, throwing punchlines at random in the same engaging fashion that got people to first take notice of him. Well, played, Kon Artis. Well played.

16. GOTTAKNOW

A subtle recurring theme throughout Layers is how depressed Royce da 5’9” is, or at least was when he recorded this project. “Gottaknow” touches on this briefly, obscuring his misery underneath what seems like a ton of lyrical acrobatic assaults, as our host uses the mellow, hypnotic Epikh and S1 instrumental to matter-of-factly rant, like that uncle who always comes over for family functions, has a frew beers, and launches into fascinating, if inappropriate, stories that leave you wanting more. May be slower than you two would prefer, but fuck all that “Gottaknow” was good.

17. OFF

Ryan ends the evening with “Off”, on which he “sign[s] off” from Layers with a lengthy, Cappadonna “Winter Warz”-ass verse that, at the very least, proves his well of bars hasn’t been emptied as of yet. Since this is basically a rap album outro, Royce doesn’t stick to any particular theme, wandering from room to room trying to figure out where the bathroom is during this party at his friend’s friend’s unnecessarily lavish home. His line about Jay Electronica was kind of funny, I guess. Our host fades his verse before he finishes, which would normally piss me the fuck off, but the music crawls to a stop independently shortly afterward, so I can let it slide, I suppose.

THE LAST WORD: I really don’t know what my problem is when it comes to Royce da 5’9” solo albums: Layers is easily the man’s best work since Death Is Certain, and may even be better than that grim effort. Layers brings us a focused Ryan Montgomery, one who is capable of writing cohesive songs that mix his penchant for boasts-n-bullshit with actual messages, with nearly every track succeeding. The production is almost uniformly excellent, which I suppose means that Mr. Porter deserves a large share of the praise here, as well. The sparse use of guests is a plus: as I wrote above, you don’t even realize that Ryan has been carrying the project all on his own until you hear Pusha T’s voice, so Layers also works as a proper showcase for what Royce can do when given the proper tools. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of Success Is Certain, I found Layers to be the course-correction Ryan needed, as he has been actively learning from his mistakes and making the necessary adjustments.  I, for one, am thrilled that he didn’t just throw in the towel all those many years ago: this phase of his career is far more interesting because of his previous struggle, and I’m sure he’s since found a way to appreciate the leaner days as well. Layers is engaging, entertaining, and just really goddamn good, and if you’ve also been avoiding it for whatever reason, don’t make the same mistake I did: jump over to the streaming service of your choice and give this a spin. Or better yet, throw some money at Royce da 5’9”: the man clearly deserves it at this point.

-Max

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