Album Review: I’ll Believe It When I See It by Dave Blunts

Performing from a chair with an oxygen tank nearby, the Davenport, Iowa rapper turns broke friends, dirty cups, and two exes into melodic trap. Unfortunately, it’s the worst rap album of the year.

For your reading pleasure, we will not show that album cover.

In the clips that go viral, Dave Blunts raps from a chair beside an oxygen tank, surrounded by raised phones, half the commentators mocking and half worried. He has created a whole career on that split. Coming out of Davenport, Iowa, worked as a writer for Kanye West before moving away from him, gained fame as much for how he looks on stage as for his songs—hospitalized one month and booked the next. His musical style includes melodic trap in the Juice WRLD style, and his lyrics are a comedy of insults aimed specifically at the locals who never asked for it. Yet, his voice is horrible.

Shuey, TwoThree, and Jordan are the locals, and he humiliates them in “Shuey Got a Job” and “Burning Spoons” for the most trivial reasons. Shuey got a job and got mocked; TwoThree cannot earn a dime; Jordan lost his job, apartment, and son. In “Burning Spoons,” he sees Jordan’s child’s mother use meth while a little daughter cries, and he threatens her to call Child Protective Services: “I’m calling CPS to tell the truth.” After that, he haggles her price down to $10 to $5. She offers that he can have her for free if he will act as her child’s father.

In “Vbucks,” the number of people to be humiliated becomes fewer, and he starts insulting himself instead. In a brag about getting head from a Walmart greeter, he adds that she gave him a sticker. A story of a hookup changes in mid-verse to a burning desire to go to the bathroom and make a phone call to get tested, and the punchline ends up as his cheapness: “Discord bitch coulda fucked me for V-Bucks.” Self-mockery becomes sad on “Cupcake,” where he brags about a sold out show even though he did perform it sitting, apologizes for pissing off Rolling Loud, who wants him to jump into the crowd, and inserts “I’m really falling victim to these opioids” into a chorus which is mostly about sex, a couplet line which can become a motto for a memoir: “And I made my mama proud/My niggas let me down.”

Solar, the girl whom he was dating and who is featured on “One More Day,” is invited home and insulted in one breath: “Solar, come home, bitch, I really miss you/Solar, come home, I need you in my life.” He admits that he called her bitch three hundred times and knows that it is not alright. He says that he would give all the money away for one day with her, and he eases his pain with a two-liter of Sprite and ten Percs. “Ciara Come Home” repeats the same to another woman, with a 50 Cent beef included; “Curtis fell off, that’s why he retired” goes right in front of him, admitting that Ciara is the one he calls when he feels lonely. On “Drown,” one of his friends, Ciara again, is seen in the video giving him lip gloss in a conversation, and then he is back to mocking Curtis Jackson about getting shot nine times. There is no craft in it, just plain cruelty targeting the most vulnerable.

In “Back on Oxygen,” he arrives in a Cullinan and lists the tank as one of the reasons people hate him, thus creating a flex based on a machine that keeps him alive. Mid-verse, he talks about the drink clinically: “And it’s Codeine fuck up my kidneys/And it’s Codeine fuck up my liver,” organ damage listed in the same breath with mockery about TwoThree using Indeed. Then, in the middle of the bus taunts: “My heart won’t get off my sleeve,” one soft line placed between a tracksuit filled with rubber bands and Abigail, who earns her living from fucking but is still broke.

Cruelty is no longer funny on “World Champ,” where a pile of humiliation is aimed at other people from his native place and where petty money jokes are replaced with alcoholism, illiteracy, and some nasty insults which cannot be written here. “Unnecessary” cannot even be called a song—it consists of a hook with slurs in the places where the jokes are supposed to be and a verse that gives up halfway through. On “Rollie,” he asks what a woman would do for his watch, and cannot come up with anything else.

Demi Lovato and Bobby Brown appear in “Scale” as company he keeps his bad habits with, something between codeine in a baby bottle and the semi-truck he sleeps with after Solar attempted setting him up. One of his exes told him that she hates the smell he has, and he passes that information along, immediately followed by bragging that turns physical: “I weigh like six hundred, so I broke the bed/I weigh like six hundred, so I broke the scale.” Wide awake in the night, he checks on Kankan, who has fallen off, cannot pay rent, and had to ask his girl for help. He cannot fall asleep, so he stays on the line with everyone back home and makes sure that they know exactly how far away he has gone.

The kindest thing that can be said about the shock value of I’ll Believe It When I See It is that it is evenly distributed. Shuey, whose fault is getting employed; TwoThree, who should download Indeed; Jordan, whose custody arrangement failed and which became a reason for a sing-along chorus with a CPS threat. The explanation is that it is comedy, that the targets are the local nobody characters from Davenport, but it only stays funny until it becomes clear that every target is more broken, sadder, and smaller than the man singing from a chair beside an oxygen tank.

Kankan deserves special mentioning because his punishment for the whole album is humiliation because of sleeping with trans women, an insult which is neither edgelord provocation nor dark comedy nor persona work, just pure transphobia put into melody with trans women playing roles of the walking punchline for the man they never even met. Celebrities do a little better, just barely: Dax is caught in a stray insult, Dr. Umar is mentioned in four words, and 50 Cent, the only person in the crosshairs who has been doing to others the same that Blunts does to Shuey over the years, is ridiculed for his long Power episodes. Career bully getting some retaliation from the man on oxygen is the closest thing this album has to a moral universe. It is a low bar, and it is the only one cleared.

Very Poor (★☆☆☆☆)

Favorite Track(s): N/A