On tracks like the colorless “Check My Swag” (sample lyric: “That Rolls Royce seems to be them hoes’ choice / They love the luxury cuz it gets `em so moist / You can call me the king cuz I got so many toys”) or “Roll on `Em” (on the subject of cops: “They usually stop me just to say they want to drive my car”), Chingy’s boasts of wealth, cars, clothes, and women remain too hopelessly generic to even elicit the novelty reaction of last year’s already-stale .Īmerie provides the overproduced hook on “Fly Like Me”, though one can’t help but wonder if it was chosen as the lead single solely because the chorus offers a respite from Chingy’s monotonous flow (if it can be called that). Even for the shamelessly dull pop-rap album it is, Hate It or Love It is well below average: the beats are typically lifeless, and the downright goofy gangster posturing carries an expiration date of 2002.
So after resolving a rather laughable feud with Ludacris over album royalties, Chingy returns to Disturbing Tha Peace with Hate It or Love It, a predictable celebration of wealth, money, and… well, mediocrity, to be honest. Chingy fans (yes, they exist - the people commenting on his YouTube videos with insight as eloquent as “diz iz mii song i b blastin diz in da car”) will be pleased to notice he still shuns the V in “everybody”, as well as the H in “with”. The song’s most notable quality was its distinctly southern pronunciation of the word “there” as if it rhymed with “fur”. Sensing a theme here? The average listener associates Chingy with his 2003 breakout hit “Right Thurr”, a then-inescapable declaration of pop-rap blandness that he’s still attempting to follow up. chose the stage name Chingy because it was slang for a rich person, his ultimate ambition to further drive the message home, he named his debut album Jackpot. Louis native ensures that all but the most loyal crunk devotees will invariably choose the former. By naming his record Hate It or Love It, the St. Could this be because, while Lupe sets a standard for innovation and positivity in a genre so often accused of the opposite, Chingy embodies everything negative about hip-hop’s modern reputation? It’s darkly fitting for both albums to appear on the same date: on the song “Dumb It Down”, Fiasco ridiculed negative hip-hop clichés, sarcastically exclaiming “Pour champagne on a bitch!” On “Roll on `Em”, Chingy repeats “Pour some candy on that bitch!” sans irony, and proceeds to encapsulate every distasteful stereotype imaginable.
Yet Chingy wisely avoided public humiliation by refraining from pointless public braggadocio. Like 50 Cent before him, Chingy’s Hate It or Love It shared a release date with another massively anticipated rap album: Lupe Fiasco’s the Cool. Remember that whole Kanye West/50 Cent feud last year? Remember how silly it was? The two rap moguls seemingly overshadowed the 6th anniversary of 9/11 with simultaneous album releases, inevitably leading to Kanye’s sales victory, a potential nail in the coffin of Fiddy’s career.