Your Old Droog - TIME Review
“While sonically TIME doesn’t do much that hasn’t been done before, the lyrics make this album a really pleasant and interesting listen.”
While Your Old Droog is far from the only self-proclaimed “greatest rapper alive”, as he boasts on ‘Grandma Hips’ from 2017’s Packs, there are few who can claim to be as prolific in their output as him – particularly during the Covid era. Following a three-album 2019, since Covid hit and releases, generally, started slowing, Droog has released four full-length albums. TIME, the most recent of these, is probably also the most notable, the three previous albums almost building towards it. A concept album looking at the passage of time (no prizes for guessing that from the title), there is a real maturity to the storytelling found here, and layers of satire and self-awareness between the skits and the lyrics which are difficult to pin down on the first listen.
After a short intro to set the scene, ‘The Magic Watch’ is the first full-length track on the album, narrating the life of a man with a watch-shaped time machine. Each verse then goes through the experiences of the time machine customers, with the memories they’re taken back to being darker than imagined, one meeting their dead grandmother, another having a close call with being raped, and the last finding themselves about to shoot someone. All of these stories are interesting in considering the trope of “if I could go back, I’d do it differently” — whether that be telling your grandmother how much you love her, or putting the gun down and avoiding a prison sentence. From here onwards, it’s almost as if we follow Droog through his journeys with the magic watch, taking a trip through different moments in his life.
First harking back to, it seems, trying to sell his first mixtape, almost begging people to listen to it, we move on to the most notable point on the record: “Dropout Boogie”, featuring a posthumous verse from MF DOOM (interesting considering, when I first heard PACKS, I thought he might have been another DOOM alias due to their similar voices and styles). Again, this track is quite dark, once more taking a benefit-of-hindsight approach while this time looking at his attitude towards high school. While he feels he’s more successful than his teachers might reckon he should be, he still bemoans his truancy and his general apathy towards school. DOOM then hops on the mic and reminds us that the blame can’t just be put on young people for not turning up to class: the school system, at least in New York where they both grew up, tended to blame the constant violence on the kids of colour, while claiming a level of self-righteousness: “windows shatter, just blame the brown Jew when the glass breaks, then thank the public school system for providing new landscapes”. The instrumental seems tailored to DOOM, with the jazzy beat led by a double bass paving the road for his verse, with whacky samples sprinkled around the track.
From here, we go from his first time getting high, to the excitement of going to McDonalds as a child, at first seeming nostalgic but, as the stories go on, it is clear it’s a childhood and a youth that he wouldn’t wish on others. The introspection of the lyrics in tracks such as ‘The Other Way’ and ‘A Hip Hop Lullaby’ is often really quite moving, the beats regularly complementing this well with a sombre atmosphere. That said, the instrumentals on the latter half of the album definitely outshine those on the first, which often become a little repetitive. There are other faults in this album, such as Aesop Rock’s slightly jarring verse on ‘Field of Dreams’ where the flow just doesn’t really flow, but overall, it is just solid — if not looking to push the boat out too far sonically.
The track which stood out to me the most on this record, though, was ‘You’re So Sick’, which takes a slight detour from the journey through his childhood to reflect, it seems, on kink-shaming. It felt like every time I listened to this track I had a different take away from it: first, it was a humorous taboo-smasher, then a slightly egotistical put-down of women trying to enjoy sex, then, after hearing the “How to be a Hip Hop Legend” skit at the end of ‘A Hip Hop Lullaby’, possibly a satire of rappers boasting about “sexual conquests”. It’s layered, definitely hard to jump to a conclusion on, and definitely not one where I can be sure of whether I approve or disapprove of the message without hearing the intentions directly from the horse’s mouse. I think, exactly in that way, it’s probably the most interesting track here, left up to a fair amount of interpretation.
While sonically TIME doesn’t do much that hasn’t been done before, the lyrics really carry this project. The narratives both allow us a look in on Droog’s formative years, with added retrospective and introspective commentary — it’s almost like the first chapter of his autobiography. The chilled-out beats and production allow for this to come centre-stage, and make this album a really pleasant but still interesting listen.
