Album Review: Good Time Boy by Prof

Prof has built eight albums on being the most unhinged man in any room. On this one, he keeps clowning straight through the addiction and the inherited damage without ever switching voices.

Courtesy of Stophouse Music Group.

You’ve always known you could pack a decent-sized room anywhere in the Midwest for twenty years, and all you had to do was set the world’s insane man on fire behind the last act on your bill. That these shows had become the stuff of regional legends was precisely due to the fact that they contained the rawest mashes, those that can’t even begin to be considered permeable for digital translation. That was the world of Prof’s Stophouse.

Because this Jacob Anderson’s peculiar putrescent strain was recognized too early by majors as too weird for them to touch, and frankly, too unstable even to approach. The air around him smells like hairspray and kerosene, just like on record. That sexually licentious cartoon is so loud it physically hurts, but so far above what speed could be needed, he sounds a lot like the smartest guy in the bar that gradually shrinks out of focus until you’re like, maybe eventually we should go ask him, hey, where do you think that we are?

On his eighth proper record, Good Time Boy, we are all of that, and only perhaps all there was with the knowing smirk he’s got on his face. Songs on this album are built so that the space for them has been framed by busy thoroughfares, some of which can be so complex that the casual listener would surely be lost inside of them for the duration of the record; songs that allow you to even hear a person shout on them without them having to compete for sonic room as the percussion of “Kin (I’m Outside),” flings back and forth call-and-response, sub bass filling in the holes.

In “Dynamite,” they twist the kick/snare percussiveness into club ready and silly pop, silly and cool simultaneously, the kind of profound foolishness to which we’ve become so accustomed when talking Prof—with another really great and ridiculously bombastic addition, “Kia Boy” was made with stabbing brass, an in constant motion, driving rhythm, and a truly pulverizing low end all ripping like death-defying race car through air, compressed and solid, it all somehow moves much further together toward even more sing-along able-able choruses that bounce off all solid surfaces on the way to back here.

2 Chainz starts his verse in a “Big Dog” way, just like a lizard, relaxed and untouchable, blinging like ice “in my cup, in my teeth, in my bezel,” with a chain dragging towards the waistline, each punch line falling a half beat late. E-40 twists “Brrrr” into absurdity, self-proclaiming himself as the “lingo inventor” with a promise to stack money “tall like Jack and the Beanstalk,” and then he walks away from an incomplete thought. Sauce Walka, who rolls in “in a Rolls-Royce” on “Destiny,” is a Houston original who opens waters “like Moses” and takes it to “Supercalifragilistic-drippy-alidocious” across the introduction, so in the character of ironic that he almost does the song’s antagonist.

Monstrous is the main difficulty factor throughout “Dirty Work.” This stripness makes space for a witty response. A distant person inquiring “is informed that there was an AirTag on your whip in 2021”; to the visitor whom he supposedly has. He triumphantly declares that he won his lawsuit against someone with the same kind of bravado as he spends most of “Jewelry Duty,” indicating he will bring back the fun to rap music with hyperbole and probably even a rhyme about an avocado that was only half and whether the block of Parmesan is only a Reggiano. The humor is always cleverly crafted; he lingers to arrange the space and then populates it.

Nonetheless, someone must take on the role of Cassandra. In “A Crawl Through a Low Tide,” Prof is painted as a smiling American monster, fueled by guns, war, and the unwavering watch of children, hurling toward a destination built on a bass line that does not change until the chorus emits so much light that it blinds: “There goes the sun, there goes the sun/We had to do it, it was blinding our children.” On “Big Wheels,” the bass again dominates the stage, but the chorus erupts with backing vocals and a swell of strings while Prof’s comic-register voice attempts to master a sweet song before he says to his partner, “You were born to be a model, Amber” in a cracked voice. The song “Garden of Eden” has the whole album transposed into a curtain of falling piano and multitudes of angels’ voices, up to the point when Prof’s internal talk comes through, trying to sell a smart speaker, and then, he finally touches on his most hopeless line ever: “I see the extinction of experience/We’re all gone and alone, lost in our phones.”

Barely noticeable by the mix of three concluding songs; The jokes are now just dust. The piano is riding on a high, steady beat for “Fighter,” while Prof is remembering a guy who beat him up: “The year was 2020, it was less than ideal/I locked the fuck in.” “Reaching for Fire” is the opposite of cockiness; Prof gazes into the mirror, seeing his father, talks about the struggle of shielding his daughter from the demons he has, and admits, “I got drugs that I just can’t kick,” with the burden of a beat that sounds like it is moving under a thousand pounds. In “Imposter,” he is at the most opens stage, his voice quivering on the hook, “I’m not as strong as I pretend to be,” before directly getting the point across.

Then you have the title track, right smack bang in the middle, which finally pulls out the frowny face to accompany the playful gloom, revealing grinning death and happy pain are different sides of a coin. The anthemic, soaring “Good Time Boy” uses piano keys and a chanty chorus, and while Prof might be wailing his heart out in the clear sense of glee, his lyrical subtext seems desperately seeking help, begging “I’m the luckiest man on earth… Would you mind if I have a good day?” His “Vegas on a Sunday morning” image summarizes the album pretty damn well, and at the end, when he raises his glass saying, “All this bullshit aside, I love you.”

Standout (★★★★½)

Favorite Track(s): “Kia Boy,” “Good Time Boy,” “Imposter,” “Garden of Eden”