2018 was a great year for Tyga, an artist who had seemingly descended into irrelevancy. Indeed, with his hit single ‘Taste’ featuring Offset, as well as ‘Dip’, Tyga re-emerged into the mainstream media, with many considering him the biggest comeback of 2018 (unless you are Soulja Boy of course). With his new album Legendary, Tyga presents an album with bass-heavy club bangers, featuring numerous significant artists, such as Lil Wayne, Swae Lee and the always controversial Blueface.
Tyga has never been an artist to create music with incredible substance. Throughout his career, he has found the most success through hook-heavy, club bangers. Despite this, he has often wandered away from this sound, which is seemingly his biggest strength. ‘Legendary’ sees Tyga embracing his strengths, enabling him to create an album which is enjoyable to listen to, however clearly lacks substance. One look at the albums cover will tell you all of the subject matter present within this project: money, fast cars and women. However, with Legendary Tyga doesn’t want to create the next lyrical masterpiece, instead aiming for strip club anthems and radio hits.
This is clear from the first track ‘Too Many’, an ode to money and women, a recurring theme throughout the album. Despite the fairly shallow contents of the track, it’s a catchy and concise song which, while not presenting much new, is enjoyable to listen. ‘On Me’, with the legendary Lil Wayne’, continues these themes, presenting another enjoyable song with an average feature from Wayne. ‘Vibrate’ is also a solid track, with Swae Lee providing a charismatic feature to break up the tracklist, though Tyga remains lyrically poor. ‘Werkkkk’ provides a catchy hook, however overstays its welcome.
Though Tyga presents numerous enjoyable club bangers across the tracklist, the album becomes far too repetitive, with Tyga failing to continue to provide unique ideas across the lengthy 14 tracks. ‘Maykherkhum’ in particular provides incredibly distasteful and repetitive lyricism (the title says it all). ‘Haute’, with R&B stars J Balvin and Chris Brown further embraces this repetitive lyricism, with Tyga continuing to detail his lavish lifestyle, creating further excruciatingly boring verses.
Often, Tyga relies on features to draw attention to songs and break up the monotony of his dull lyricism. However, the album contains few enjoyable features. Blueface’s feature on ‘Stash’ is absolutely awful, with Blueface’s typical off-beat style ruining the vibe of the song completely. On top of this, Blueface’s lyrics are incredibly tasteless, continuing his run of poor features and solo work. Gunna also presents a lacklustre feature on ‘Legendary’, produced by Munra-Beatz, with an incredibly short, heavily auto-tuned verse which fails to satisfy.
Though Tyga has headed in the right direction with ‘Legendary’, embracing his trademark style of bass heavy strip-club anthems, the project is far too long. At 42 minutes, Tyga has created an incredibly dull and repetitive project, which fails to capitalise of the recent hype developed from his hit single ‘Taste’. Indeed, though Tyga does present some enjoyable tracks, the album is monotonous and often difficult to listen to, failing to deliver much at all.
2.8/10
Written by Jacob Matthews
Masterpiece Music 