"A Drake-like rap(per) on the verge of a Drake-like sound"
Devon Jackson
Magazine Editor - Freelance Music Journalist
Devon Jackson has written about music and film for a variety of publications—from Entertainment Weekly and The Village Voice to Rolling Stone and Details. He is also the author of Conspiranoia! and currently the editor of Santa Fean magazine.
Here is what he had to say about Crowd Control:
“A Drake-like rap(per) on the verge of a Drake-like sound”
While there are admirable elements of rappers as boastful as Drake in this hip-hop throwdown, and while it has a great deal of catchiness in terms of what it’s laying out—that Jus’ J’s “got that crowd control”—it lacks a certain sump’n sump’n. Jus’ J has a voice somewhere between a smoother-voiced Ice T and Chamillionaire, and though he has an immediacy of presence, there’s something about the horns but especially the percussions (the drums) that keeps getting in the way of Jus’ J’s rapping and the overall orchestration of this song. There’s a wooden sound to the way the drum comes in when it does that’s just giving too much play to such a clichéd smoove-jazz-type of percussion. Ugh. But I like the rap, and the fluidity of J’s rhymes, and the line “even Rachel Ray she wants to taste this.” Nice. And the horns and the bigness of the arrangement here is admirable, it doesn’t quite get deep enough. There’s a crying out for bass—I feel. Big bass. A deeper bass sound that should be hitting listener’s right in their sternums. It seems too that it shouldn’t fade out the way it does at the end; for a song this boastful, of having crowd control, it oughta be going out with a bang, not a whimper—leave with control, leave with authority, leave with the presence with which you came.
(Source: musicxray.com)
