It isn’t too often that comedy in music can create an album that results in more than mixed results.B Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, and Andy Samberg form the comedy group The Lonely Island, whose efforts consistently turn out funny music.
The Lonely Island’s debut album, Incredibad, borrows from many different rap music styles as well as a couple other genres.B The best part of the album is that the audience doesn’t even necessarily have to like rap as the subject material cannot be taken seriously.B If you’ve watched Saturday Night Live within the past few years, some of the songs should sound familiar: five songs were SNL shorts at one point or another.B
None of these songs are terribly long, which prevents tedium and redundancy on the part of the artists, allowing each song to finish up when should.
If the length of the tracks is an issue, then the rest of the album should make up for it: there are a total of 19 tracks on Incredibad, with a staggering amount of variety and subject matter to boot.B If that weren’t enough, a second disk is included, featuring eight music videos, two of which feature songs not included on the first disk.
Though The Lonely Island seems capable of carrying themselves on their debut album, they’ve drawn heavily from a deep pool of guest talent.B Artists E-40, T-Pain, Jack Black, Julian Casablancas, Norah Jones, Justin Timberlake and actors Chris Parnell and Natalie Portman all contribute to different tracks.
One of the funniest tracks is “Natalie’s Rap,” which proves once and for all that Portman is as nasty and foul-mouthed as any gangster rapper.
Most of the lyrics can be taken quite literally.B For instance, the song “Punch You in the Jeans” sounds like it would be very unpleasant to the wearer, but Akiva and Andy makes their intentions clear: “Yo we’ll punch your jeans, we’ve said it before.B Best believe this is not a metaphor.B You got something to say, we’ve got the proper retorts.B Beat your jeans so bad that they’ll wish they were shorts.” It is far from subtle, but something tells me that subtlety could only hurt them in the long run.
Overall, it is good to hear music from time to time that doesn’t try to harness some sort of deeper meaning.B Some might feel that Incredibad is not clever enough to pass as a comedy album, but the direct path it takes to comedy is spot on.
