The New York rapper attempts to be all things to all people, but in his efforts to split the difference between bar god and pop rapper, he ends up proving he is neither.
For a while, it seemed like Bishop Nehru was living the dream of every aspiring teenage rapper to ever sleep under an Illmatic poster. Before he’d turned 20, he’d: scored beats from super-looper 9th Wonder; signed with Mass Appeal records; and finished an entire tape with drunken uncle rhymer MF DOOM. Nas, somewhat ridiculously, dubbed the young, earnest rapper “the future of music.” But Nehru has spent the years since 2014’s NehruvianDOOM trying to both live up to these co-signs and play them down. He relishes the notoriety that comes with his lyrical miracle title and getting asked about being endorsed by hip-hop royalty, but he dreads the prospect of being pigeonholed as dated and dusty. His new album, Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts, is an attempt to be all things to all people: conversative wordsmith, progressive curator, storyteller, anthem-maker, introspective entertainer. In his efforts to split the difference between bar god and pop rapper, he ends up proving he is neither.
The album is mostly produced by Nehru with a few assists, including DJ Premier and DOOM. It woefully samples diet trap, jazz rap, and boom bap. Just as Elevators: Act I & II was haplessly divided into two parts, the Kaytranada-produced “Ascension” and the DOOM-produced “Free Falling,” My Disregarded Thoughts follows a similar model. “The Abyss” is supposed to represent the darker recesses of his mind; “The Escape,” his relentless optimism. The binary doesn’t provide any narrative focus, or explore a duality, the way Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded separated Nicki’s rap and pop instincts. Nehru is chasing a balance between his classicist nature and his Grammy ambitions—“still lyrical, still hip-hop, but with a way to make everyone relate to it on a grand level,” he told Clash. His gestures toward relatability aren’t subtle: He does some singing, flexes over some Maaly Raw beats, and even utters the words “too litty” through Auto-Tune. Every one of his attempts to show range demonstrate how limited he is.
The bits of SoundCloud rap parody aren’t fooling anyone. “All of My Years” sounds like the TV movie version of a Chance the Rapper song. In all his straining efforts to show off the skill that landed him a Madvillian apprenticeship, he sounds lightyears away from city dwellers like MIKE and Medhane, meditative rhymers who do far more with less. Even the Premier-produced “Too Lost,” which should be right up his alley, sounds like a chore. He raps some as the voices inside his own head, which can be an effective device, but where a song like Kendrick Lamar’s “u” is tension-filled and gripping, Nehru’s struggle to personify his mounting anxiety doesn’t make any discernible impact.
Too many of these thoughts truly warrant disregarding. On the intro, “Colder,” he laments going over the heads of the closed-minded masses before rapping this galaxy brain couplet: “They want me mad, ’cause cops drop us within a week/But it’s nothin’ new, it’s just now you can send a tweet.” Getting worked up over police violence is pointless, because racism is old hat, he asserts. Wake up sheeple! His songs about being alone and lost are circuitous, constantly reiterating how alone and lost he is without ever probing what he’s feeling or why. His would-be boy-king rants about ruling the rap world are like celebrating winning a race you’ve already been lapped in (on “Emperor”: “I know that I got the recipe/I mixed the grinding with destiny”). So much of this album is vacant and inexpressive. “My main muse and fuse is just life in general,” he declares on “Never Slow,” sounding like the corniest rapping anti-drug PSA. “Little Suzy (Be Okay),” his story of a homeless girl who becomes a drug addict, is all clunky exposition, no activity. There is more talk of thinking than actual thinking taking place.
Nehru is often considered a technical rapper, but his bars are amateurish, cluttered, and inexact. His rapping can be so syntactically bizarre it sounds like it was written by a neural net. And this isn’t zany obfuscation like his metal-faced mentor; it’s a lack of precision. The raps aren’t hard to follow, per se, they’re just off. He forces phrases to fit his schemes instead of letting them unravel naturally. His flows are stilted, pushing to prove expertise he doesn’t have. And the bars that aren’t completely flavorless (“Been broke, my pockets had mad hope/Couldn’t buy a laugh like bad jokes/And they wait for falls like bad ropes”) are mind-numbingly lame.
When given some thought, Bishop Nehru’s bifurcation of rap and pop feels woefully out of touch. Not just because the worlds of rap and pop seem more and more indistinguishable every day, but because even the most hardcore, bar-heavy posturing can reach a really wide audience—DaBaby owned 2019. Nehru doesn’t need to change tactics to become the rapper he seems confident he can be, he simply needs to be a more lucid writer and a more arresting performer. On Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts, he’s convinced himself that the key to unlocking his rap career is broadening his horizons. But Bishop Nehru doesn’t need to branch out; he needs to go back to basics.
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