Will the real Asher Roth please stand up?!

Edit: I was so tired after writing papers at like 3 in the morning when I was inspired to write this entry, hence the grammatically incorrect title for the past few days, heh.

So i never really considered myself a fan of Asher Roth. It wasn't the Eminem thing, but i can definitely blame "I Love College" for keeping me hesitant. Anyways, i was hearing a lot of buzz about his new album, Asleep In the Bread Aisle. Also, i saw the Cee-Lo featured video and was definitely enjoying the hook and his flow over the beat. There's a video on YouTube somewhere in which Mr. Roth and Cee-Lo meet for the first time, it was a interesting experience to hear how an artist pitched himself.

I just spent the last 45 minutes(?) or so listening to the tracks i haven't heard from the album yet, along with a few which seemed promising to in that box of related content. His major label debut as a whole was a more marketable rendition of what i had heard in comparsion to stuff like this song my coworker showed me:



HE RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPS THAT SHIT. And that was posted about a year and a half ago. Am I really surprised? Of course not. Unfortunately, the real talent that's left in the industry gets washed down so much by corporate America that in order to make any kind of huge dents in the market you have to make sacrifices on behalf of "success." The kid is nice, but once again he's a victim to the system.

There is some hope though, as Asher released a mixtape with DJ Cannon called The Greenhouse Effect. It's definitely a much more recent representation of where Roth is lyrically; rapping over some pretty popular and sick beats in order to get some nice mixtape work in. One of my favorite tracks is "Cannon." In my opinion, the mixtape is a billion times better than his major label release. Hopefully Asher Roth finds his balance within the music game, since not so many people really do it because they truly love the artform of Hip-Hop.