Kottonmouth Kings are positioning The Green Album as their defining tour de force. They even brag that, “The Green Album is definitely the Kings most defining work to date and should etch the Kottonmouth Kings legacy in time forever!!!” (three exclamation points not added sarcastically). But I can’t for the life of me discern what legacy they’re trying to leave. They’re certainly not the first group (hip hop or otherwise) to devote almost all of their musical energy to celebrating weed. Blending rock and rap won’t exactly turn too many heads looking for originality. And laying out the most obvious rhymes this side of second grade Mother’s Day poems probably won’t get them invited to too many freestyle sessions (deal, real, automobile…genius!). In actuality, their style is just an amalgam of the local past from their Southern California home—the laid-back delivery of early 90s West Coast rap, the frosted-tip good time alternative rock of the same era, the I-love-bud mentality of, well, just about everyone in the region. So much for leaving a mark.
The album’s name supposedly derives from their concern about planet Earth; they even promise to donate an unspecified percentage of profits to environmental causes—an admittedly admirable endeavor. But their planetary distress is like that of your garden-variety hippie. They slur vague things about loving nature, make no specific statements about the cause/solution and then just hope that everything is solved while wondering why their fingers leave trails in the sky. I suppose it’s better than railing hazily about fault; is there anything worse than a preachy pothead? But let’s face it: considering the subject of at least seven of every eight of their songs and the pictures of dozens of marijuana plants on the album art, the Green is about one thing only, and it’s not rectifying mankind’s carbon footprint.
Yet faintly uninspired intentions aside, where The Green Album fails is in its utterly inane sameness. Take any random track on this record…any one…and play it. Painfully warped ABABCB song structure? Check. Laz-E Boy MC drawling? Check. Four by four lyrical stanzas? Check. Overproduced club-friendly rocksteady beats with zippy turntable staples? Check. And every tokin’ track (which, again, is just about every one) is that…exactly that…over the course of twenty songs at more than seventy-seven minutes—yes, seventy-seven frickin’ minutes. To call it a tough ride is putting it mildly; I was sporting a four-Tylenol headache by the halfway point.
And even if they don’t appear on every cut, the same old tricks are played out again and again. Big bass back-up vocals saturate at least a half dozen refrains—an odd way to try and make these hippie hoppers sound “hard.” Every intro is either a half-baked segue from the last song or differentiates itself with overcooked sonic tricks such as rainfall, alarm clocks and the familiar standby: Cadillac-bouncing stereo shout-outs. And with only a few exceptions, every song is three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half minutes long, ensuring that you can not only finish each of their phrases with a roll of the eyes before they do but that you can accurately predict every trick they try and pull on the decks.
Any effort to do things slightly different just calls attention to how feebly they integrate innovation. The slow-it-down Kid Rock-style “ballad,” “Stand” (a rare non-weed-oriented track), the squeaky little girl additions to “Trippin” and “Super Hero,” the “I Believe I Can Fly” meets Bone Thugs ethereal hey-ho vocalizing on the dull epic, “Freeworld”—nothing they try works. Then there’s the (snicker) naughty “Sex Toy,” featuring someone called Tech N9ne (not a typo), which starts out as a terrible Prince-wannabe and then adds a bland punch-up beat, horn overdubs and a “so fresh, so clean” trip. Poor OutKast. And on “K.O.T.T.O.N.M.O.U.T.H. Song,” they actually repeatedly spell out the group’s name again and again like they were in the damn Mickey Mouse Club. As for “Puff N Tuff”’s Larry the Cable Guy-esque “Git-R-Done” shout-out, the less said the better. On “Rock Like Us,” they ask, “Who do you know that can rock like this?” Thankfully, no one else, Kings.
Lyrically immature and sonically flat, The Green Album will probably only appeal to the sorts of people cruising around in a tricked-out Sedan wearing cannabis leaf T-shirts and played-out do-rags with no imagination. It’s hard enough for even a good act to stretch an album past the hour mark without becoming bloated; imagine a witless one going way past that. When the “cleverest” thing Kottonmouth Kings can do is change the Made in the USA label on the album cover to Grown in the USA, you know you’re in trouble. If you’re new to the Kings and wonder, “How bad could The Green Album possibly be?”, allow me to educate. The MCs are named D-Loc, Daddy X and Johnny Richter. Before you let that sink in, consider that they list some guy called Pakelika with the dual duties of hydro-mechanix and visual assassin. And even if you’re able to forgive their, ahem, band eccentricities, let’s consider how they perform. As odd a combo as it might seem, if Smash Mouth was trying out for Insane Clown Posse and added a dash of Sugar Ray…then a different group ineptly steals that sound, you might get Kottonmouth Kings. Unless that actually sounds appealing to you, I just saved you thirteen bucks.
