Album Review: WD, Vol. 1 by DyMe-A-DuZiN
Twenty years into his career, DyMe-A-DuZiN turns every grievance back onto himself, and the album is excellent hip-hop.
In the early 2000s, a gospel rapper trained children in a Crown Heights church, and among them was a ten-year-old DyMe-A-DuZiN in a suit who enjoyed working a crowd. He got this name from the man, and it made sense since his mother had been singing with the Risen group while his grandmother was a backup vocalist for the Isley Brothers. It wasn’t the church where he could run away from anything. Shootouts were taking place outside the church’s door, as told in an interview with Chilling with Monie, and the church leaders had grown up on the same streets as those attending the church.
Those were years of plenty to blame others. The merger that he could not control brought him from Warner Bros. to Atlantic, and his manager, Chris Lighty, was supposed to solve this problem. “Wayans Bros” ignores all these issues. Instead, he remembers the manager who told him to have patience. But he was unable to do it, so he started recording tracks from his mother’s basement: “Empire fell, I feel I’m to blame, I ignored the warnings/Signed on the line, now my honor’s taken.” There is one question that remains unresolved in the verse—if the people surrounding him are his brothers or TV actors. But he answers all the others, and his answer is always him. Even the woman who is checking his phone is a testimony against him.
Yet another pimp preaching from the pulpit, and the one who makes this accusation connects with God via his chakras when he preaches. “The Pilot” manages to have both statements appear close to each other in bars, and he even asks the one at the pulpit how he knows Christ since there’s not much to quote.
There have been no kids just yet. Although this hasn’t prevented him from parenting two on “Parent Hood,” in which he begins with a disclaimer that he does not think that he has the capability of bringing a child into the world but builds them all the same. A son who is taught how to find structure and religion and a daughter who knows a fool when she sees one, praying that their angels are strong enough to survive against the demons robbed of everything by preachers. He wonders if the art of managing and raising a living being can turn him into a man. Curtiss King takes over for the final verse and does not leave this question unanswered. He makes sure DyMe finds himself at four in the morning holding a bottle of Similac that needs to be shaken and warmed before anyone delivers it to the crying kid. Ending his verse by stating that DyMe hasn’t done any of this in quite some time. The father that he did grow up with walks into the picture on less notice. He is a visiting line on “Do Over/Unhappily Ever After,” in which the lines left him too far away, and the time spent in those lines was anything but good. Four lines down, he is replaced by a preacher with access to Cadillacs and a job preaching.
Basement gets back in the picture, but this time doing other things. Before, he was cutting tracks there; right now, he is trying to figure out his mind there. “Jamie Foxxx” gets all of that one verse, starting out with “I’m not a sex addict if you should ask” and only getting more serious from there. His question is, “What is a goon to a gooner?” Edger on the track of the loser is his own term for that, with proof in a paid membership that allows losing the ads. “But chill on that,” he cuts himself off at one of the bars. “Hypersexualization, mind-wastin’” comes as a self-diagnosis in just a few bars after that. Phone gets into the “Birds of Prey/Dawson’s Creek” track when he is afraid to show her one. He is betrayed by his algorithm, and where a woman makes an entire second half, just hoping he will love her again, as she is alone and waiting.
Wati Heru takes care of the hook with what’s new, responding to his query with new shoes and some backstabbers. This is little enough to go with DyMe, who turns “Kept cordial poems on microphones. Now the cord’s to your neck” on “News at 10,” and these two songs don’t have much to do with each other. “Supernatural” comes at the issue from the other end, where the chorus drives the song and the verses couldn’t care less. Dead platforms make for the highlight, “You was MySpace, you was imeem,” with BLKZEN making his entrance with magic tricks and everyone believing he’s a wizard.
DyMe was the upperclassman who was recording in the hallway of Edward R. Murrow at the time that Capital STEEZ approached him circa 2010 wanting to be tutored. According to him, he got the younger rapper on his feet and was paid back in kind with some influence. This becomes a line of succession in the second verse of “Sister, Sister.” Beginning with a stepfather who took him under his wing all the way to the man that he addresses (Joey Bada$$ and also JID by name), whom he tells to stop ignoring the fact that he is his offspring. Everything is according to his word. The second half goes through “I Call Your Name” by Switch, while “30 for 30” by SZA and Kendrick Lamar gets interpolated in his verse. He writes in his sharpest manner with someone in front of him. He brings the heat in full form for the advice verse of “Wayne Heads.” In which New York is a titan that sleeps, and the advice being offered is to lower an ego that he refers to as the weakest weapon that you have. A nurse has already seen his chart in the song and discovered that he lacks a backbone.
This is how “7th Heaven” gets its King of New York claim, on honest conversation and no drug raps, “The stamp without the stove.” This is the only boast that does not end up self-deprecating, and yet the punchline comes anyway, from a different place. He doesn’t need to consult some kind of culture expert. Yet this is something that had to be said to make clear how strange it is to have spent two decades of a career being managed by them. The same sort of skepticism hits an internet that kills the realist and has live chats replace therapy that no one paid for. It ends with his father, in the verse just before it goes into the drugs in his family history and the last name Donnovan, in a track about being the greatest rapper in the city.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Wayans Bros,” “Do Over/Unhappily Ever After,” “Parent Hood,” “7th Heaven”