I’m a charming fella, I like drinking cans of Stella

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

20/10/23 : Sick Boi - Ren 

I've never heard of Ren, but I'd have guessed he was a UK rapper even without seeing the album title.  My expectations aren't massively high but sometimes these things turn out to be an unexpected surprise, so here's hoping, eh?

Well, well, well - there's all sorts here.   I can't claim to be an expert on the various hip hop genres (there are a few) but this certainly dabbles in plenty of them - we've even got some scratching on one of the tracks.  That's proper old school, that is!  It doesn't always work, but you can't fault the ambition and there's some proper talent on display - the speed of some of the rhymes is proper fast.  He also throws a LOAD of cultural references spanning many, many years - the man must be very well read.  He also has a somewhat unfortunate obsession with the size of his penis, but when he manages to avoid going on about that he can put a good narrative together - I particularly liked "Money Game Pt 3".

We're at #1 with a new entry this week - his first ever week on the chart!  The rest of the top five are Rick Astley (another new entry - apparently it was a very close race for #1), Drake, Troye Sivan (another new entry) and Holly Humberstone (ditto).  We have two more new entries in the top ten for The Streets (#7) and When Rivers Meet (#9) and a somewhat surprising re-entry for Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon.  There is an obvious reason for this though - Roger Waters's redux version of it that charted last week was so ridiculously pompous and overblown that people flocked to the original to purge their mind of it (thankfully it's dropped out of the chart this week).

Last week I said that Drake would drop to #4 and once again I surprise myself with my estimate because he's at #3 - I REALLY don't see the appeal.  I think Ren will be doing well to hang in there at all, but I want him to and maybe enough people will check it out because it's #1 to help him out there - so let's go for a hopeful #73 next week.  Taylor stats for the week are NONE in the top ten, five in the top twenty (including #11-#13!) and nine in the whole chart.

Wikipedia tells me this is his second album, after Freckled Angels which was released in 2016.  The large gap was down to health issues - he suffers from Lyme disease, but it was misdiagnosed for years which lead to mental health issues as well as physical.  But he views this album as a victory over his health and so I'm pleased it's done so well for him.  Wikipedia also tells me that Ren is his real name - which shows some hip-hop prescience by his parents.

"Customers also listened to" Bear McCreary, The Big Push, Dirt Miller and Scroobius Pip - I'm only aware of Scroobius (not his real name in this case - it's David) but there are definitely some similarities there with Ren.  This album won't be for everyone, but I found it quite an interesting listen and definitely admired his ambition, skill and references on it - particularly so after last week's Drake-dross.

13/10/23 - Bearable until you listen to it
27/10/23 - Surprisingly bearable