Mount Westmore: Snoop, Cube, 40, $hort review – harmless nostalgia and charmless bluster | Rap

Last October, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too $hort released not-bad bop Big Subwoofer, its camper-than-panto video showing the west coast rap supergroup Mount Westmore flying into space to… stage an am-dram Avatar sequel in a strip club? It was never quite clear. Distressingly, they tried to parlay the limited artistic gains of that debut single into a summer album, Bad MFs, which appeared “on the blockchain” (honestly, no idea) and is proffered here with a worse name and tracklisting. Its lush, soul-stroked title track is gone, while the drab, misanthropic Have a Nice Day (Fuck You) remains.

Their four quite different flows still work reasonably well together, from $hort’s lubricious bars to Cube’s truculent pugilism, over comfort-zone beats of electro, P-funk and other familiar 1980s grooves. Yet harmless nostalgia predictably succumbs to charmless bluster. Up & Down is the nadir, wherein our four elderly chums become obsessed with watching a “thicc” woman (wife, mother, daughter or stripper, it’s again unclear) struggling to put on jeans because of the size of her thighs. It’s supposed to be amusing, but has all the wild comedy of listening to your dad trying to finish a porno.

Last October, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too $hort released not-bad bop Big Subwoofer, its camper-than-panto video showing the west coast rap supergroup Mount Westmore flying into space to… stage an am-dram Avatar sequel in a strip club? It was never quite clear. Distressingly, they tried to parlay the limited artistic gains of that debut single into a summer album, Bad MFs, which appeared “on the blockchain” (honestly, no idea) and is proffered here with a worse name and tracklisting. Its lush, soul-stroked title track is gone, while the drab, misanthropic Have a Nice Day (Fuck You) remains.

Their four quite different flows still work reasonably well together, from $hort’s lubricious bars to Cube’s truculent pugilism, over comfort-zone beats of electro, P-funk and other familiar 1980s grooves. Yet harmless nostalgia predictably succumbs to charmless bluster. Up & Down is the nadir, wherein our four elderly chums become obsessed with watching a “thicc” woman (wife, mother, daughter or stripper, it’s again unclear) struggling to put on jeans because of the size of her thighs. It’s supposed to be amusing, but has all the wild comedy of listening to your dad trying to finish a porno.