B.o.B began griping about the trials of fame long before he had any. "They say that I'm changing/ Cuz I'm gettin famous," went the chorus to 2008's "Fuck You", a bluesy lope of acoustic guitar and twangy harmonica that recalled vintage Dungeon Family. The logic was counterintuitive, even a little ridiculous, but the song itself was warm, fluid, and surprising. It was B.o.B in a nutshell: arrogant, self-aware, undeniably promising. The long road from that to The Adventures of Bobby Ray seems dominated by record execs who manicured, man-handled, and placated the rapper. They catered to all his worst instincts, and he gladly surrendered himself to theirs. The result should serve as a cautionary tale to all involved, except for one small detail: The Adventures of Bobby Ray was the No. 1 album in the country last week.
To put that in perspective: Bobby Ray sold 84,000 copies. In 2003, when people still bought CDs, these numbers would have been embarrassing for a high-profile hip-hop debut, but in 2010, they are, apparently, victory-lap worthy. Atlantic invested time and effort into "grooming" B.o.B, and since record companies tend only to take notice when their pre-planned strategies pan out (ground-level phenomena like Gucci Mane tend to get dismissed as flukes), we can expect to see a lot more records patterned explicitly on The Adventures of Bobby Ray. And that's a truly depressing prospect. As a primer on what major label execs think they need to do to sell a rap record to a mass audience in 2010, Bobby Ray is a queasily fascinating document. As an actual album, it is wretched-- a dishearteningly generic and hollow product with no soul or demographic or viewpoint that arguably bottoms out three separate times.
It turns out that the answer to the above question-- "What do major labels think it takes to sell rap albums in 2010?" -- is simple: hide the rapping. Bury it under dewy pianos and sensitive cooing; sugar-coat it with emo-pop choruses; tuck it behind compressed guitars. Basically put it anywhere listeners are least likely to notice it. This is a disturbing strategy to pursue, but it's particularly galling here; B.o.B is a fantastically gifted rapper, with an astonishing rhythmic command and a tricky, limber way with phrasing. On Bobby Ray he's reduced to a guest rapper on his own songs. Only three tracks feel even remotely connected to a rap aesthetic, and they are the best things here by a mile: "Bet I" finds him somersaulting joyfully around a juddering 808 kick, backed by an equally on-fire T.I. and Playboy Tre. "Fame" flips a sample of Canadian cheese rockers April Wine into a surprisingly funky horn loop, and "5th Dimension", despite a ludicrous yowled hook from Lenny Kravitz stand-in Rico Barrino that bites "Inner City Blues" and regrettable space-rock guitars, features some of B.o.B's most vivid rapping.
The bulk of the record, though, is a undifferentiated mass of sticky-sweet modern-rock radio in which it's difficult to single out the lowest moment. Is it the air-conditioned sub-Coldplay crooning of Bruno Mars on "Nothin On You"? Bobby Ray's inexplicable decision to turn Vampire Weekend's "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance" into a Sublime song? Or the appearance by Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, whose creepily blank vocals on "Magic" sound like the engineer has a gun to his head? B.o.B himself struggles to inject personality into the proceedings. In the lyrics to "Airplanes", a moody teen-pop melodrama with a chorus by Paramore's Hayley Williams, Bobby Ray pines, just like he did on "Fuck You", for simpler times. "Somebody take me back to the days/ Before this was a job, before I got paid," he asks, remembering, "back before I tried to cover up my slang." It's a brief acknowledgment of what he has had to give up to get here. The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a curiously lonely affair, the sound of a singular talent being drowned in a tidal wave of cheerful banality.
