Sean Mims' Musical Offenses

“Mims once again gives fans a glimpse of talent. Something that gives you hope…Mims delivers a solid debut.”
-Jason Fleurant
“…the 26-year-old Manhattan MC adopts Jay-Z’s staccato flow…His seamless shift from pimp tales to reflective narratives…versatility”
-Henry Adaso
“a catchy little thing with a cool …beat and some goofy charm…the beats keep things moving…Kick back and enjoy it.”
-Christian Hoard

It seems to me that it was far from right for the reviewers of “Nobody’s Smiling”, “About.com”, and “Rolling Stone” to deliver opinions on Mim’s music without having heard some of it. It would have been much more Hot to keep silent and let those homies talk who have heard Mims.
Mims’ art has some defects. In one place in “Like This”, and in the restricted space of two thirds of a song, Mims has scored 114 offenses against musical art out of a possible 115.
There are nineteen rules governing musical art in the domain of hip hop- some say twenty-two. In “Like This” Mims violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a song shall go somewhere and change somewhow. But “Like This” goes nowhere and changes like a stubborn teenager.
2. They require that all vocalists in a song shall be alive, except in the case of absent ones, and that always the listener should be able to tell the absent ones from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in “Like This”.
3. They require that the vocalists in a song, both absent and present, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail has also been overlooked in the “Like This” song.
4. They require that when the vocalists in a song deal in lyrics, the lyrics should sound pleasing, and being lyrics such as human beings would be likely to enjoy, and have a discoverable (if not intelligent) meanings, also a discoverable beat, and a show of talent, and remain in the neighborhood of the slightly audibly titillating, and be worthwhile to the listener, and help out the genre, and stop when the lyricist cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the “Like This” song to the end of it.
5. They require that when the lyricist describes himself in the manner he does, the lyrics and musical quality shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the “Like This” song.
6. They require that when a vocalist raps of his superiority and talent in the beginning of a song, that he not prove himself wrong by the end of it.
7. They require that the MC shall make the listener feel at least a slight interest in the song and in its build. But the content of “Like This” is so bland that the listener wishes he could drown the song altogether.
8. They require that the quality of the song be so clearly defined from the start that the listener can tell exactly how it will turn out. And actually, Mims doesn’t violate this. The beginning sucks, and so does the rest.

Mims’ gift in the way of flow was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to torture us by working it, he was somehow pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of unoriginal pop-crap devices he kept one or zero braindead devices, tricks, flat beats for his stale rhymes and uninteresting mixes to disguise each other with, and was never so happy as when he was working these terrible concoctions and seeing them go. One was to have a terrible beat tread in the footsteps of awful vocals which were too repetitive to not hypnotize the masses, thus covering up the terrible beat’s existence. The repetition is like being hypnotized with Rage, except you’re being hypnotized with suck rather than awesome. Another device that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the guest vocalist. His trick was to bring talent into a song which he had sucked it from, but unfortunately his guest vocalists had none themselves.
Mim’s is certainly not a master in the construction of lyrics. Insufficient talent defeated him here as it did in so many other enterprises. He even failed to notice that the flows which suck 15 tracks an album must suck the 16th time, too. But no, he thought it could be good.
Mim’s flow sense was singularly dull. When a person ahs a poor ear for music, he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. Mims had the smarts to know this, but unfortunately thought his forte would be in the world of the monotone. He keeps near the monotone, but unfortunately tries for rhymes now and again.
A work of music? It has no invention, no appeal, nothing at all aesthetically pleasing; it has no pop-likeness, no thrill, no stir, just a painful drawling, analogous to being dragged through a garden full of pirhana plants.
Counting these defects out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
-OSK

Pastiche that, literary world. Pastiche that.