Steve 'Flash' Juon“I’m laughing to the bank like ha, ha, ha ha.”
I’m all for rappers who are trying to not do the same thing as everybody who came before them. MajinBlxxdy certainly stands out from his peers and deserves props for that. At first blush “Gates of Hades” might appear to be a horrorcore album, but progenitors of the genre like Brotha Lynch Hung and Esham would barely recognize it. MajinBlxxdy’s producers Killhaley and Krxxk provide him with backdrops that eschew sampling, melodies, and the rules about distortion entirely. They mix his vocals in a way that are nearly sub-audible, making it easier to hear sound effects like screams and gunshots than his own vocals on songs like “School Zone.” If you try hard enough though they’re there.
“Fresher-fresher than a bitch, if I pull up, I’ma bag yo’ bitch
Couple niggaz claiming they the hottest, boy, that’s cap as shit”
The truth is that it’s actually closer to “horrifying” than most horrorcore. While the genre is known for bloody, violent, macabre rap songs that embrace horror movie tropes, the songs on “Gates of Hades” are genuinely unsettling by deviating so far from the standards of the genre. They don’t aim to entice you to listen. There’s nothing to bop your head to here. While the lyrical themes MajinBlxxdy expresses run all of the tropes of drill or gangsta rap from “not giving a fuck” to “freshest drip with the flyest whip” he’s not creating music you can dance to OR sing along with. You have to make a genuine effort to listen to songs like “I Hate Everybody” and it has nothing to do at all with the topic or the bars.
This has created a conundrum for me that I’m just going to say “fuck it” and tell you about directly in the review. I don’t enjoy “Gates of Hades” and I don’t recommend it to anybody, but I’m very glad that I listened to it. If that’s confusing to you then you understand the dilemma I’m in right now. I appreciate so much that MajinBlxxdy did something completely different from everybody else that I’m willing to give him his flowers for it right here, right now. Just because it’s not music for me or perhaps you doesn’t mean he doesn’t have an audience for it. He’s “laughing to the bank” because he’s found his own lane that nobody else is in, and there is always an audience for something far different from the norm out there. This is a new kind of horrorcore that exceeds any expectations you have of the format through the presentation alone, being more macabre in sound than in content.