Steve 'Flash' Juon“City city life really upsets ya
Dealing with it can real-ly wreck ya”
I’m not saying I’m a wordsmith on the level of Pharoahe Monch or Black Thought, but I think I could come up with something better than rhyming “ya” with “ya.” This is the Boogie Boys though so my expectations are pretty low going in. You might argue that’s unfair but that means you haven’t listened to “Girl Talk” off “Survival of the Freshest.” I’m not sure I’ve heard a more blatant ripoff of every successful rap act of the 1980’s meshed together in one song. It’s impressive in just how blatant it is. I hear LL Cool J. I hear UTFO. I hear the Fat Boys. They’re even ripping off their own hit “A Fly Girl” with the stripped down drum track, although the corny over-the-top breakdown nearly kills it.
For as bad as it is “Girl Talk” was the only marginally successful thing off this record, hitting No. 62 on the Billboard R&B chart for 1986. At least it charted? Certainly not high enough for it to be memorable almost 40 years later. The rest of this record is comically bad, which is at least good for a laugh, especially when you have a song like “Starvin’ Marvin” long before South Park used the name. It’s possible (though highly unlikely) Matt & Trey heard this album before writing this episode. That would at least give this mediocre record some historical significance.
It’s all downhill from there. The Boys craft an ode to love that genuinely makes me wince with “Share My World.” Did anybody ask the Boogie Boys to act like New Edition? A worse version of New Edition? No. It’s like Kadeem Hardison suddenly decided to confess his love to Jasmine Guy in the most cringe worthy way possible. If “Girl Talk” was “A Fly Girl” part two, then “Run It” is part three. “Now wherever you go, you’re gonna see a big show/You’re sure to see, a-someone that you know.” These simplistic rhymes are only made worse by the fact everything is “like” something else. “If every rapper was a ship I’d be the head of the fleet/If every rapper was a spy I would be James Bond/If every rapper was a lover I’d be Don Juan.” Romeo’s rap makes my head want to explode like an atom bomb. “Romeo y’all.”
“Survival of the Freshest” is hard to listen to. From the opener to the incredibly naive “Colorblind World” closer, it’s like every rapper in this group was living in a sheltered upper middle class world where everyone owned a Cadillac (the go to bragging car of the 1980’s) and had a chauffeur to drive them around in it. It doesn’t matter who they intended this 38 minute album for. Black kids would have found them incredibly out of touch with real life. White kids would have found them way cornier than the increasingly hardcore rap acts of the era. Any other race would simply have thought dumb ideas like “Colorblind World” were as insulting as the nursery rhyme raps. How this group survived to have three albums is a genuine mystery to me.