Steve 'Flash' JuonIn the 1920’s a woman named Dorothy Parker became famous (and accrued fortune) for her sharp tongued reviews and acerbic wit. She committed one of the literary sins almost all of us are warned away from in journalism from the first day of school — inserting yourself into your stories. You are rebuked for daring to write “I” and are instructed to be as impartial and indifferent as possible. Your pen exists as an instrument to record observations, and your personal views are not to skew your reporting in any way. Parker cared not for such rules. Each review read like a window into her life, one which was scandalous even in her own time, where too much drinking and carousing left her hardly the energy or enthusiasm to write… but write she did. Her bitter admonishments of the bad and boring writers she was forced to read and how they made her headaches worse are the stuff of legend.
Though I’ve long since curbed my appetite for alcohol, Lance Romance’s “Fortune & Fame” makes me feel a bit like the late Ms. Parker. I had hoped the cheesy album cover would give way to an album of more substance, but songs like “Ain’t That a Shame” leave me reaching for the aspirin bottle. Ichiban subsidiary Wrap Records put this album into the world in 1991 and really should have kept it under wraps. I like a good stinky cheese but this is one of those foul European brands with live maggots crawling around inside of it.
I was told Lance Romance was a new jack swing rapper and I can certainly hear him attempting to be one on “Treat You Right.” I’m going to be fair for just a moment and note that Lance was a one man show on both this song and his album. He wrote the lyrics, he arranged the instruments, he performed and produced everything. That’s a lot of work to be such a corny rip off of Teddy Riley’s sound and style, but I can’t say he wasn’t working hard at being this bad. MAXIMUM, EFFORT.
I wish I could tell you “Fortune & Fame” gets better (there’s that impertinent “I” rearing its ugly head) but “Treat You Right” is the high water mark and we sink faster than the Titanic did after that. “Headache” lives up to its name by being a thinly veiled rip-off of Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative.” The caterwauling and pianos of “There You Go Again” makes me wish he hadn’t. I don’t doubt his sincerity when he says he wants to “Concentrate On You” but listeners will have already picked up a phone and started doom scrolling their way through X. “When you concentrate, it gives me a lift.” If only.
Despite all warnings not to commit the unpardonable sin of “I” in a review, I have to make it personal and tell you this album and its music took away hours of my life I can’t get back. It’s made all the worse for the earnest sincerity with which Mr. Lance Romance Matthews plies his trade. He’s completely oblivious to how much of a lame clone of better sounding artists he is, whereas I can recognize my own shortcomings here and elsewhere at will. I might even call myself a hack if you forced me to give an opinion of my own work, but I’d still rate it higher than listening to this city-scape of terrible new jackery.