Big Body Bes is, first and foremost, a human cartoon character. The Juggernaut played by Joe Pesci. TV personality, actor, rapper, jet-setting chubby hand model, all of this is only a consequence of who the man is. Most people have to work at being interesting or famous or funny. Bes is incapable of turning it off. He is larger than life in every aspect, a psychotic glitch of gene expression millions of years in the making.
That doesn’t necessarily make for good music, but the Big Body Bes catalog has benefitted from careful moves & polished tracks. The Albanian Ape is a rapper with a lot of assets & connections, but none of them beat having Action Bronson as a coach. Love him or hate him, Bronson is one of the foremost rap stylists of the past decade, running up a killer catalog by mastering the martial art of making low-effort songs sound like classics. Small touches in the right spot have a huge impact, and you once you understand these rules you’re free to break them.
Pretty much every rule about rapping gets broken when The Gorilla Gourmand is in the booth. Fundamentally, the joke here is that he can’t rap and isn’t trying. Instead, he channels something squarely inbetween Flavor Flav doing hypeman rants and Macho Man Randy Savage cutting wrestling promos. The punchine here is that it works. He really can sell this absurd bullshit off pure charisma alone. His Don Rickles timing, the outlandish & impossible details of his boasting, and the unhinged delivery all make it possible for The Golem of Lindenwood to carry a rap song without ever actually starting his verse.
The After Hours Ambassador is an acquired taste, of course. I’m not saying you have to like it, only asserting that I very much do. It takes a certain kind of lunatic to appreciate genuine insanity.
The Honorary Puerto Rican has been talking about dropping his debut album for years now, and perhaps this is finally it: the dawn of the real-deal promotional rollout for Body Language, which has been “ALMOST DONE” since 2017. I fucking doubt it, though, and so should you. Prepare yourself for another decade of guest spots & random singles.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Hanging out with Alchemist & Meyhem Lauren is a life well spent. Fuck the record industry anyhow. Four Dickies.
