Album Review - “The Gentlemen’s Club” by YG
YG’s latest album, The Gentlemen’s Club, is a phenomenal selection in exploring hood politics, the challenges associated with Black male adulthood insecurities, and the high-risk-high-reward lifestyle of gang culture. Through 15 songs, YG provides an album that is honest to a fault and accurately flawed in its politically correct missteps.
If this is anyone’s first YG album, the idea is to enter with zero expectations. With no understanding as to what YG stands for, his gang affiliation, subject matter, or down to his beat selection. The artist enters as an unknown entity, except that his rap career is over a decade old, and this is his seventh album. What occurs is that you come to understand his storytelling ability is some of the best in modern rap, and his rapping voice is one of the most easily digestible tones in the genre.
Through the nearly hour-long album, over half of the songs are stories told from YG’s perspective, including the (hopefully) fictional “Hitman” series, where YG attempts to assassinate himself. While lesser artists would certainly make these themes exponentially more complicated than they need to be, YG has a proper understanding of the beauty of getting in and out of a project before listeners' remorse kicks in. This album is a beautiful display of such, down to the feature selection, which showcases YG in a way that you enjoy the features and preserve his style without experiencing burnout.
Production-wise, this project is a West Coast staple. Songs like the Pusha-T-assisted “OMG” thump and bump across your headphones while songs meant for softer tones like “Kudos” offer hypnotizing pianos, which somehow still find a way to include heavy West Coast influence. None of which is an issue, as YG handles and guides these tracks with a marksman’s accuracy.
Overall, YG takes the project to task and delivers an album that’s surprisingly introspective and hauntingly relatable, with tracks like “Insecure” and “Writing My Wrongs.” He offers an eclectic mix of vulnerable, sometimes fun, sometimes funny, and admittedly sometimes difficult.
