Erick Sermon - React (November 26, 2002)

React is the fifth solo album from Erick Sermon, the producer-slash-rapper that will forever be remembered as one-half of the seminal hip hop duo EPMD. Within the parameters of its forty-six minute run time, Sermon accomplished the following: outsourced production duties for a third of the project; managed to alienate and offend the world’s Hindi-speaking community with the first single and title track; and, worst of all, failed to move many units, the utmost cardinal sin where it comes to the music industry, resulting in his label home, Clive Davis’s J Records, dropping him from the roster with the quickness.

Considering that his previous album for Davis, Music, contained the biggest hit of the man’s career, this clearly wasn’t the outcome anybody expected to see.

Music was released shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, welcomed into the hearts and minds of many listeners who found the soothing tones of the prominent Marvin Gaye sample found on its title track to be optimism defined. Indeed, the track was so successful that Sermon quickly moved to title his then-upcoming project after it, even going so far as to release multiple versions of “Music”, including a remix featuring his Def Squad brethren Redman and Keith Murray, along with a take for heavily-oppressive R&B radio stations that refused to play any rapped verses at all, even if said rapped verses came from the artist whose song it was to begin with. Yes, this does mean there is a version of “Music” out there credited to Erick Sermon, but not featuring any of his own vocals, only the Gaye sample. Yep. That's a real thing that exists.

React hit store shelves one year and one month after Music, and yet still sounds exactly like the type of rushed product an executive may force an artist to push out in order to strike while the iron is hot, said iron being Erick Sermon, a dude who, at this point, had already been in the rap game consistently for over fifteen years. Its two singles existed solely to chase musical trends: “React”, the title track, took the then-popular Bollywood sound to its foregone conclusion within our musical genre, while “Love Is”…well, you’ll read about “Love Is” later on in the write-up.

Overall, React isn’t held in very high esteem by anyone who likes to remember Erick Sermon in a kind light. If that describes you… well, keep reading, because you’ll probably like the writing, especially if you pretend that I made up every single track just to have something to write about.

1. INTRO

I mean…

2. HERE I IZ

Our host says the titular phrase during the intro, which is fashioned as a live concert that leads into “Here I Iz”, so I suppose I should be grateful that Sermon saw fit to isolate the non-musical shit onto its own audio track. I’m not, though, because “Here I Iz” isn’t very successful as the reintroduction to Erick Sermon it was intended to be. It’s a short song, and it does feature both an E-Double instrumental (one which fills a similar void as his better work on his prior effort, Music) and his genial goofiness behind the mic, but the experience as a whole isn’t great. For one, “Here I Iz” is egregiously poor grammar, and even though I listen to hip hop all the goddamn time and have heard much worse, my mind refused to wrap itself around that grammatical nightmare of a phrase. Secondly, Sermon’s proclamation of “a sixteen verse burst, the last two are eight bar” isn’t even met on “Here I Iz”, which contains two sixteen-bar stanzas instead, so it was kind of weird that he chose to leave the lyrics as is. (Also, “sixteen verse burst”? He knows that doesn’t mean what he wanted it to, right?) Finally, Sermon’s bars have always been filled with seemingly random pop-cultural references, more so throughout his solo career (look out for his unprovoked name-dropping of the movie Thirteen Ghosts during the final verse here), but the lines that feature no such booster leave much to be desired: shit, he makes the same Def Squad comment on two separate occasions during “Here I Iz”, which is just fucking lazy. I have to move on, I can’t do this one anymore.

3. WE DON’T CARE (FEAT. FREE)

The first of two Just Blaze instrumentals appears on “We Don’t Care” and… um… *raises finger as though about to say something, hesitates, falls back*… was this the very first beat the man had ever created? Because it’s bland as fuck. Exactly what was it about this instrumental that compelled E-Double to whip out his wallet? If there’s something special here, I’m sure as shit not hearing it. This was flat-out boring to me. Driving through the tedium is Erick Sermon, who contributes three verses full of boasts-n-bullshit and bars that make little sense out of context (“Yo, I’m a hero! / Sometimes I feel the same way like the folks involved with Ground Zero,” he mentions in one instance of, “excuse me, sir, but you really need someone to take a quick glance at these rhymes before you record them, sir”), coupled with a ton of name-dropping, both of song titles and actual celebrities, as though he recently discovered his grandson was The Game. Guest star Free, of 106 & Park and a short-lived stint in Wyclef’s Refugee Camp-fame, helps out with the hook exclusively, and is utterly wasted doing so. “We Don’t Care” doesn’t seem to think much of its audience: there’s a phrase that I could use here, one that fully encapsulates the artists’ true feelings about the listener or the listener’s reception to this track, but it escapes me at the moment. The only interesting aspect of this nonsense occurs during the very end, when an uncredited Reggie Noble pops up just to have his vocals faded as the song ends. Just… why though?

4. PARTY RIGHT

Although a more upbeat atmosphere is reached on “Party Right”, given the use of a sample lifted from the Larry Levan remix of Gwen Guthrie’s “Seventh Heaven”, it would have been rather difficult for it to not have injected React with a shot of adrenaline, however mild. The instrumental is an uncharacteristically lazy one for E-Double, though, and I say that even though the man has relied on his rubberband bass notes for far too long: it plays as though he were listening to The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Friend of Mine” (off of Ready to Die) on the way to the studio that day and thought, “Why not me?” But I won’t overthink it – I’ll save that shit for the chorus. Sermon’s three verses are all made up of the boasts-n-bullshit only a dude with over thirty-four years of experience in the game can muster, with awful puns and forced name-drops that accompany them with the upsized combo meal, but at least he’s having fun talking his trash. You two will likely find this one to be entertaining enough. That hook, though: I honestly couldn’t tell (because I wasn’t really trying, let’s be real, I demand that our host do the work for me) if it was airlifted from Redman’s “I’ll Bee Dat” (which is the most likely scenario, as you can hear some of the Reggie Noble ad-libs from that track on here) or if Sermon recorded his own version of those bars. The latter option probably didn’t happen, but Redman’s early work did sound a lot like Erick Sermon, so it would have been one hell of a callback if that were the case. Ah well.

5. REACT (FEAT. REDMAN)

The other Just Blaze instrumental of the project, which hits differently in 2020 but mostly holds up (aside from the hook – more on that in a bit), is featured on its title track, and let me tell you, Justin’s interpretation of what he thinks Erick Sermon beats sound like is a pretty intriguing one. Not to say that “React” is a straight-up store brand of our host’s past work, however: Blaze does add a flourish of his own, namely the source material for the (apparently re-sung and not sampled, per the man himself) vocals utilized as the hook, which is already a dire mess of cultural appropriation (as the producer dips into the same South Asian well that many others had done prior) even before you hear Sermon’s dismissal of the sample vocals with a condescending, “Whatever she said, then I’m that.” Do you even really need to know what exactly he was agreeing to here to be annoyed and offended? (The answer for some of you two is likely, “Yes, please, I need more information before I can determine if he’s the asshole in this situation,” so here goes: the “hook” loosely translates to “if someone wants to commit suicide, so what can you do?” per Google, a phrase that seems even more bleak now considering Sermon’s later (alleged) suicide attempt in 2001. Happy now?) E-Double and his Def Squad co-defendant Reggie Noble, who makes a proper appearance here, pass the microphone around back-and-forth ion a relatively genuine approximation of two rappers having scheduled “fun”, with Redman’s finely-tuned instrumental absolutely annihilating the Green Eyed Bandit, although our host seems to be enjoying his mentee running laps around him. Sermon’s line, “Come through, storm the block like El Niño,” seems to imply that he had been sitting on that rhyme since at least the recording session of the Def Squad’s lone album to date, El Niño, but that’s irrelevant to this conversation: aside from the asinine chorus, which is an embarrassingly bad look for Erick Sermon, “React” isn’t bad. It’s not the best E-Double and Redman collaboration, but for 2002, a point when both acts weren’t exactly reaching new heights in the rap game, it’s fairly enjoyable.

6. SKIT I

…

7. TO THA GIRLZ

Producer Megahertz, whose work has always contained more than a little bit of Erick Sermon influence, provides the instrumental for “To Tha Girlz”, and it’s such a riff on E-Double’s sound that, again, one is left to wonder just what our host saw in the music that he absolutely had to purchase it for himself, as opposed to running home and throwing some shit together himself. The song is full of mixed messages, especially when aligned with the preceding skit: Sermon’s on the lookout for a soulmate (he likes “a big-boned chick, but that’s just me”) that he can spoil but who doesn’t need him for shit, because they would, ideally, have their own money, job, and ambitions: he wants an independent, driven woman, which sounds fine when you’re reading these words on your computer or phone screen. But there’s a sound bite that plays right before our host’s opening verse that literally says, “We got to let the girls know what they got to do for us!”, and, welp, that’s a fucking red flag right there. Sermon dismisses a potential partner for “play[ing him] like an old Volvo” (seriously, what?) when he wasn’t yet rich and famous, tells her that she should offer to pay for meals and drinks on dates (whether he means “on dates with him” is unclear), and calls out her apparent promiscuous past. All of which should automatically disqualify him from wading into the dating pool, because that shit is toxic as fuck. (Sure, he ends his second verse with, “Same rules apply for the same-ass n----s,” but it’s an afterthought.) At least Sermon asks for consent during the (crappy, A Tribe Called Quest-aping) hook?

8. LOVE IZ (FEAT. GREGORY HOWARD)

Hi, everyone! Remember back in 2001 when Erick Sermon scored his biggest-ever solo hit with his “collaboration” with the late Marvin Gaye called “Music”? Remember how it was so successful that he not only named his ensuing album after the song and remixed it (with his Def Squad brethren) using alternate Gaye vocals in an effort to stretch out the lifespan of the track, but also released a second single from that exact project also featuring a Marvin Gaye sample that was clearly designed to chase that same dragon? Well, do I have some news for you! “Love Iz” is one hundred and ninety-five percent Sermon’s prayer for lightning to strike in the same place for a third time, swapping out Gaye for Al Green samples, the main difference here being that the Reverend is still with us. (He doesn’t contribute to “Love Iz”, but, to be fair, the song credits never imply that he did, unlike on “Music”.) Sermon’s chop of “Love & Happiness” is so much an Erick Sermon concoction that it’s awfully strange that he had never thought to sample it so flagrantly before, but his bars, bobbing and weaving around sampled vocals, don’t hold up to scrutiny. Content-wise, “Love Iz” ostensibly describes many different forms of love and affection, but our host is all over the fucking place. Here is a selection of actual lines spoken into existence by Erick Sermon during “Love Iz”:

“(Love is) When true fans who don’t believe in rumors” (obliquely acknowledging his alleged suicide attempt);

“Whoever killed Pac and Smalls, they’re lame / Erick Sermon, learn my name”;

“(Love is) Def Squad, Keith Murray, Redman” (okay, that one was kind of sweet);

“(Love is) When the planes hit / And the world got together like baseballs and mitts” (I had forgotten how Music was released shortly after 9/11 (I wrote this sentence well before doing the introductory paragraphs), but that doesn’t make these bars any less weird)

I shouldn’t have to tell you that E-Double sounds unfocused on “Love Iz”, but E-Double sounds unfocused on “Love Iz”, and the song, which wasn’t such a hot concept to begin with, suffers for it. The instrumental was kind of a gimme for Sermon, though.

9. GO WIT ME

Our host’s laughably bad storytelling effort “Go Wit Me” (why not “Come Wit Me”? That’s a far more natural phrase in the English language) telegraphs its surprise ending in such an obvious manner that you’ll find yourself wishing that he had stuck to the “Jane” series (even though he and Parish really treated her like shit, right?). The “Andre” Sermon mentions at the very beginning is Andre Ramseur, who produces the track alongside E-Double, and the result is a tempo reduction that, nonsensically, still dwells in Sermon’s rubberband bass like a screwed version of David Axelrod’s “The Edge”. The Green-Eyed Bandit uses the slower pace to weave his tale, which plays like the plot of a segment in a terrible horror movie such as Tales From the Hood 2. (Anyone ever see that shit? It’s fucking godawful. Except for Keith David – he’s a goddamn treasure.) Sermon names far too many characters during the first verse for the listener to adequately keep track of, and his big twist that (SPOILER ALERT) the man they meet up with, the man they follow back to his orgy-filled home, was the Devil all along, is so hilarious that you’ll be tempted to rewind the song so you can recreate the experience, but you shouldn’t: it won’t be nearly as funny the second time around. Sermon’s “Go Wit Me” plays like an audio version of a Chick tract – he may as well preach to the audience about the benefits of finding Jesus. Not even Kanye West’s horrible Jesus Is King stooped to that kind of nonsense.

10. SKIT II

The fuck was this waste of audio space, Sermon?

11. HOLD UP DUB (FEAT. KEITH MURRAY)

The other Def Squad reunion track is disappointing, to say the least. But I’ll say the most, since I’m reviewing the fucking thing and all. “Hold Up Dub” features a Rick Rock instrumental (not sure why both Def Squad features take place over outsourced beats) that makes the man sound like a one-trick pony: it sounds so much like his work on Jay-Z’s “Change the Game” that I found myself hoping that Memphis Bleek would casually pop in through the window just to say, “Who the fuck. Want. What? / Catch Bleek in South Beach out of the reach of the police,” (that segment will now be stuck in your head, you’re welcome), and if I’m wishing for someone like motherfucking Memphis Bleek to drop by and break the monotony, then your song is already too far gone for anyone to fix. E-Double uses “Hold Up Dub” to talk specifically about himself, which is why one of his many nicknames appears in the song title, but he doesn’t seem to be comfortable with the instrumental. Even less so is guest Keith “Keith Murray” Murray, whose flow is so flawed and painful to listen to that I’m over the goddamn moon that our host didn’t deem it appropriate to invite him to the “React” studio session, as he would have tanked that shit faster than Trump’s doing with the United States of America. This shit was bad.

12. TELL ME (FEAT. MC LYTE & RAH DIGGA)

Not to be confused with “Tell Em”, a marvelously space-y collaboration with both Murray and Reggie’s sister Roz found on Sermon’s sophomore effort Double or Nothing, “Tell Me” is our host’s attempt at shining the spotlight on female artists, although he can’t help but pop into the booth, too. E-Double’s instrumental here is pretty good, the best that’s come from him all evening: it hits just the right notes of Erick Sermon-ness, but includes some depth that gives it a fuller sound. Unfortunately, “Tell Me” isn’t that great of a song otherwise: our host, who takes the opening slot, pats himself on the back a little too much for coming up with the song in the first placer, and guest MC Lyte sounds overwhelmed by the beat’s tempo, which causes her contribution to drag. Only Rah Digga, formerly of Busta Rhymes’s Flipmode Squad, manages to make it out of “Tell Me” alive, spitting her verse with the scowl of a hardened vet that deserves much more screentime in her career. Le sigh.

13. SKIT III

…

14. S.O.D. (FEAT. ICARUS, RED CAFÉ, & SY SCOTT)

Fascinatingly, the best posse cut on React features collaborators that you wouldn’t expect much from otherwise. Erick’s boy Sy Scott, who he keeps pushing onto the Def Squad audience even though he needs to stop trying to make “fetch” happen, Redman’s (former?) protégée Icarus/Icadon, and unaffiliated-with-our-host outlier Red Café, whose career was in its beginning throes at this point, all team up with a surprisingly hungry-sounding Sermon for “S.O.D.”, a movement of braggadocio in four parts. In no way do any of these guts stack up to E’s usual partners-in-rhyme Redman or Keith Murray (or PMD, for that matter): if they spit too long of a verse, their relative lack of experience reveals itself to the listener. But with our host limiting everyone involved to just sixteen bars, each participant has just enough time to engage the audience with their various styles of boasts-n-bullshit, jumping ship just before they lose their nerve., Sermon, who co-produced this instrumental following the lead of Kaos, manages the best performance here, his most focused of the entirety of React, from the meta awareness he presents with, “Yeah, I know, you never expect me to anchor [a posse cut]”, and the sly reference to his alleged suicide attempt in 2011 (“I’m gutter… I’m hanging on the side of the crib”). This isn’t a great song, but you wouldn’t shut it off.

15. HIP HOP RADIO

I feel like Sermon really thought he was saying something profound on “Hip Hop Radio”, but the execution is faulty, in that it sucks.

16. SKIT IV (KHARI) (FEAT. KHARI)

Sermon couldn’t fit his boy Khari onto “S.O.D.”, apparently, so as a consolation prize, he gifts him an interlude all his own, which he fills with an acapella verse. At least this wasn’t another one of those asinine skits from earlier.

17. DON’T GIVE UP (FEAT. LTRIC)

React caps its evening with a bit of corporate synergy, as Erick Sermon makes room for his labelmates, the now-defunct R&B trio Lyric, on “Don’t Give Up”, his version of a positive, uplifting song about never giving up on chasing your dreams. He works in some real-life examples to help inspire the listener, such as how Redman was rejected from Def Jam Records several times before he finally convinced someone there that he was worthy, and, unlike on a lot of this project, our host sounds sincere, at least when it comes to his message. His beat is blandly Erick Sermon-esque, but it isn’t awful, nor are the, er, lyrics from Lyric, which all sound like serviceable R&B, albeit the type that is indistinguishable from any other act of the day. (Apparently they were the first group of their kind signed to J Records – not really sure what Clive Davis was going for here, since it isn’t as though the industry was lacking in this department.) “Don’t Give Up” is a perfectly fine way to end an album, if not necessarily a “banging” one, or a “good” one, or even “memorable”.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Erick Sermon’s career high of “Music” (I’m talking the single specifically, not the album as a whole) was always going to segue neatly into the catastrophic follow-up React, because that’s just how these things tend to go. Few may have expected the severity of the damage caused to the E-Double canon, however: React goes a long way toward proving that Sermon’s best days were well behind him. React constitutes the laziest work from the veteran producer by quite the margin: it plays as more of a contractual obligation than a body of work from a man who was, at least at one point, one of the most celebrated producer-slash-rappers in the game, and his lack of inspiration is very noticeable. Sermon goes back to various wells with such poor results that even the rare instance where he tries to do something unique, such as celebrating female emcees, brushing up on his long-dormant storytelling skills, or even trying to motivate the listener into action, comes across as condescending and pandering. Our host’s beats sound like Xeroxes of his past work (even “Love Is”, which isn’t a direct riff on early Sermon, hits the exact same bullet points as his previous “Music” had), and his deference to outside help also fails him, as none of the guest producers provide top-shelf beats. Erick Sermon’s bars also lack the charisma and energy that we look for in EPMD’s best songs: he sounds almost relieved that the words are spilling out of his mouth, because that means he’ll never have to say them ever again. Nearly everything about React is passive to a fault, and for the listener, the best reaction is the absence of any reaction.

BUY OR BURN?  If you decide to burn (read: stream) this album, you’ve already given it far too much consideration, and that’s what you feel in your heart, who am I to stop you? If you’re still on the fence, though, I have one word for you: don’t.

BEST TRACKS: Redman sounded good on “React”, and “S.O.D.” was enjoyable. Everything else, though? Nah.

-Max

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