Laborious and Painful

The Spin: Syleena Johnson – Labor Pains
Released December 23, 2008
2008 Anylees Entertainment / Federal Distribution
[rate 1]

note: I want to foreword this article by apologizing. I’m a fairly straightforward guy. It gets me into trouble. In this case, I don’t want to pander or patronize. There isn’t a lot of good music that’s accessible to a broad audience. However, over the last few weeks, there has been a drought of album releases, for whatever reason (blame it on the holidays, I guess). The majority of responses I’ve gotten to my articles have been in defense of the musicians’ works that I’ve panned. I’m not a mean guy, but I have no problem being honest about distant artists on huge record labels that make music to suck every dollar out of people of the most average intelligences. I find this act offensive, and when I see well-spoken artists simplifying their music and pretending, just to sell albums, it frustrates me that they’re not living up to their potential and that they’re not trying to challenge their audience to understand something more sophisticated. The vocabulary of the average American shrinks every year. If you watch TV, movies, listen to music from yesteryear, it’s obvious why. No one is being done any great service by our artists trying to capitalize on the poor education of Americans. At any rate, there are better albums coming up, and I go into every review hoping for the best and trying to remain positive. I just haven’t been able to. Surry. I guess I’m a snob?

Image courtesy of www.myspace.com/syleenajohnson

“Labor Pains” sounds like a pretty contrived album title to me, but it’s not nearly as bad as “Beyonce is Sasha Fierce,” right? But then, I have no idea why people love Beyonce so much. Anyway, optimistically on to the album…

There’s a fair amount of funk in this album. That’s about as positive as this is going to get, unfortunately. There’s an amazing amount of plagiarism on this album. “Where’s the love” includes the same title as a Blackeyed Peas hit from a few years back, lyrics from The Lox’s “Money, Power, Respect,” and Syleena takes advantage of your radio’s favorite rapper’s tendency to use vocoder, becoming the first female I’ve heard of riding the current mega-trend.

Syleena remakes her father, Syl’s, “Is It Because I’m Black” which was sampled by RZA for The W. Her track is extremely similar, though slightly less funky, but it probably would’ve been the best track on the album had her father not done it with so much more grit and emotion. It kinda ruins it. Then, for no explicable reason whatsoever, she claims to want “diamonds and rings and things.” It’s strange to me that she would want to have a part in killing Africans, but then, it’s strange to me that she’s attempting to make music. Incidentally, she sampled her father’s “I’m Talking About Freedom” in her “Freedom,” which steals melody and lyrics from Nas’s “If I Ruled The World.”

Image courtesy of www.myspace.com/syleenajohnson

The track that indicates that this album isn’t an album at all and that it serves no purpose other than to make a lady some money, is “Be Me,” which basically tells her sob story about all the hard work she had to do to get from upper middle class to making relatively uninspired albums, despite that she must’ve had access to decent connections through her father. It’s not an inspirational tale. It’s melodramatic, there’s no lyrical wittiness, the music is mediocre, and her vocals are not impressive. Greed combined with dumbness and pandering hurts my heart.

In “You Let Me Down,” Syleena, Jr. does her best Mary J., which isn’t very good, “How many times have you told me you love me and how many times have you ran out on me and said I’m sorry,” followed by, “Aw, hell naw, can’t take no more.” *Yawn*

“Shoo Fly” is one of the most musically interesting tracks on the album, thanks to its minimalistic exotic sound. Lyrically, it’s all about how threatened her man’s ex makes her feel. I find that content to be lame, personally. I mean, that’s just my opinion or whatever, which is pretty meaningless or whatever. Don’t take it seriously. It’s all cool.

The most entertaining song on the album is “Maury Povich.” The beat is really corny, and the lyrics amount to hating on girls that have kids, basically. It’s entertaining in the same way the movie, “XXX” with Vin Diesel. It’s funny, but it’s not supposed to be. The whole thing is so horrible that you have to keep paying attention to it just because it constantly sinks to new, delicious lows. It’s a ridiculously contrived silly storyline and it’s hillarious. Incidentally, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if this song were passed out to sex education classes, to inform guys about some of the condom-hole-poking that does occur from time to time.

The lead single from the album is, “Is It True,” which includes 808s, synth horns, harp sounds, and cliche lyrics, for those whom might be into that sort of thing.

In “Your Love,” I recognize a disturbing tendency in popular musical lyrics that I’ve previously noticed first noticed in “Independent Women” by Destiny’s Child. Syleena’s song claims that “no one could offer all the fortune and fame… cause all I need is your love.” Essentially, by acknowledging that someone might accept money for sex, the lyrics in these songs validate this arrangement as a viable romantic relationship. The “Oh, I would never do that, just in case you were wondering” seems analogous to seeking clemency because you were honest.

In “My First,” Syleena combines a fairly interesting track, primarily thanks to the timbales, with nonsensical, immature, shallow, explicitly sexual lyrics, a la “Even though I’m not a virgin, you’re still my first.”

The last three non-interlude tracks compare sex to a workout, claim “Don’t go home, I really wanna stay home with you tonight,” and talk about neglecting your kids so that you can go to the disco, respectively.

While listening to Labor Pains is both laborious and painful, the title really bears no significance that I can find. This album is a cheap rip-off of lots and lots of things, but owes super-plagiarism-credit to Mary J. Blige’s particular body of work. Musically, lyrically, and vocally, this album under performs any expectation that a person could set for a musical album. The lyrics aren’t just bad, they’re boring immature, irrational, pandering thoughts that happen to rhyme with a complete absence of any literary device. Content-wise, there’s a common thread of the relationship between material things and love throughout this album. She seems fairly concerned with both, but she wants to make it very clear that she probably doesn’t usually expect to get the material thing from her man, it seems safe enough to assume.

Labor Pains is a collection of shallow self-centered sentiments being re-hashed through fairly average vocals and lyrics lacking poignancy or creativity to beats that are relatively unoriginal, albeit catchy. I give this album one star because I don’t absolutely completely hate every beat on here.