'Prom Queen' - Who Cares?

Ah, growing up in the 90s.

So besides the usual platitudes about how our finest rappers should spend their prime rapping and not making rock albums (though Wayne records so much material and frankly has rapped terribly of late, so I don't see that this matters even in that regard), I have no complaints with 'Prom Queen.' I know absolutely nothing about rock, so I'm not too qualified to assess this thing, but the instrumental sounds pretty damn boilerplate, Wayne obviously isn't a singer, and I don't know how much T-Wayne a man can take, especially when he's as heavily manipulated as he is here. But otherwise, it's a decent song - he's got a solid hook here, a little bridge, the lyrics are okay - of course it isn't terribly funny or playful in the way that a Wayne rock song would probably have to be to be a success, but oh well. At least it isn't a total disaster and there are a couple moments you can laugh at or sing along with if you're stuck in traffic with this on the radio. Basically I have no problems with artists attempting to work with genres they're no good at, so long as they don't do so in a pretentious way and admit that, in an objective "is this good rock/r&b/rap" sense, their efforts suck. For instance, if, say, Beck had made a rap album, that would've been cool with me - his attempts at rapping were usually fun enough - so long as he didn't sell it as the work of some genre-crossing genius and gave you the impression that he knew he was just fooling around. I think you know where I'm going here so I won't even go there, but suffice it to say that when a certain artist debuted his first single off his latest album on MTV, I was just as cool with it as I was with this, until it became clear that the project was intended to be taken Very Seriously, and of course it doesn't bear that weight, not at all.