Wiz fares much better when challenged, and the more real estate he cedes to guests, the less opportunities he’s afforded to trip himself up.īlacc Hollywood is peak Khalifa-bleary eyed, genteel and, eager to please-but these qualities are just as often foibles as strengths, as a glut of pop-rap neck-massages bears out. Taylor Gang newbie Ty Dolla $ign’s blithe hooks on “Hope” and “Still Down” are among the album’s best, and Nicki Minaj’s assist on verse three of album closer “True Colors” curtly immolates just about everything that came before it. “KK” avoids disaster by turning its second half over to Memphis drug rap legends Juicy J and Project Pat. “House in the Hills” reunites him with How Fly costar Curren$y for an aspirational banger that’s home to some of the album’s best pure rapping. Lead single “We Dem Boyz” delivers the album’s biggest, easiest thrill by dispensing with rapping almost entirely, sliding into a pillowy Detail production with a dash of Auto-Tune and a lyric sheet largely comprised of the titular chant: “Hol’ up, hol’ up, hol’ up, we dem boyz!” Wiz isn’t a character possessed of the right mixture of slapstick and real danger to pull this kind of rarefied goon posturing off without a wink, but the absurdity is easily half the fun.Įlsewhere, Khalifa wins when he calls in a friend. “Raw” rides twinkling synths and 808s with a spirited Gucci Mane flow so in pocket you forget it’s kind of a commercial. Sometimes the pared down songwriting approach succeeds.
(“In my car, uh-huh/ Cruisin’ down the street, uh-huh/ So stoned I’ma need something to eat, uh-huh”) “So High” caps every line with an enthused “Uh-huh” refrain, but rather than wringing humor or menace from the device (a la Juvenile’s classic “Ha”) Wiz hurtles a stream of minutiae about what happens after he lights up. “Hope” invites a group of gold-digging clubgoers to “Come fuck with the stoner and get stoned.” “The Sleaze” informs us that Wiz “Just copped the newest thing” and “did it with ease,” without divulging what, exactly, he bought. There’s a wispy resignation in his voice and a faint, noncommittal thread in the songwriting that sends a few of these songs across the line from pop accessibility to plasticity. The issue, then, is that Wiz doesn’t sound like the guy rocking the party so much as the one out back baked as shit and melting into a couch. Blacc Hollywood is a blur of late night bottle service orders and wake-n-bake seshes that imparts more elite weedhead bonafides than hopes or dreams.īut people don’t come to a Wiz Khalifa album to plunder the mysteries of the heart-they come to party. He’s got his own strain of Afghan kush (“KK”), he breaks it up with a grinder (“So High”), he smokes it out of his own brand of rolling papers (“Raw”), he does this every day (“Stayin Out All Night”), sometimes in his car. It’s possible for an artist to be too on brand, and Wiz’s music is almost monomaniacally obsessed with outlining how much weed he has amassed and his plans for burning through it. Labs and Sledgren, Blacc Hollywood’s production choices are inspired-but you could never mistake it for possessing an adventurous streak, thanks to the waxen array of prurient drug raps at center stage. From the smooth jack of Ghost Loft’s Kitsuné America 2 single “So High” to ace placements from radio titan Dr.