Alright, here's 1,400 words on Enzo's album:
nZo (aka Real1)
Real1 Ent. Presents Rosemary’s Baby Pt. 1: Happy Birthday
Self-Released
1 out of 5
Former pro-wrestler Enzo Amore has spent the better part of 2018 attempting to re-brand himself as a hip-hop artist. An outspoken fan of hip-hop during his time in WWE, the rap references he’d sprinkle into his interviews reflected just how much time he’d spent with the music, and his social media expressed a desire to live the full hip-hop lifestyle. Following his termination from WWE, he opted to lead his considerable fanbase into his musical aspirations. The result is his debut album
Real1 Ent. Presents Rosemary’s Baby Pt. 1: Happy Birthday.
It’s really not good.
I don’t think anyone expected it to be a classic, and even to suggest it’d be a passable endeavor would be optimistic, but even novelty records made with a sincere love or respect for rap music can at least be carried by the charisma of the person behind the mic. Looking at Enzo’s debut rap single as ‘Real1,’ the non-album “Phoenix,” one could hear a confidence about it that made the awful “consensual penis”-peppered track the feel-good car accident of the season. Instead, on
Rosemary’s Baby Pt. 1 we have unquestionably the worst album-length rap performance by absolutely anybody this decade.
That’s not to say it’s some bargain-bin cash-in or some Soundcloud struggle-bars recorded on Microsoft Sound Recorded and ripped from a CD-R. The beats are objectively fleshed out and the mixing is crystal clear. It’s precisely how polished the rest of the album sounds that shows how truly unfathomably wretched Enzo is at the actual act of rapping.
We really should have expected this. When Enzo was in the WWE and rapped his entrance music “Sawft is a Sin,” the vocals had to be edited together with the precision of a neurosurgeon by the company’s in-house producers CFO$ to actually resemble a rap song. Left to his own devices, Enzo used the money from his royalties to treat whichever producers he found to fleece him and tell him his rapping on
Rosemary’s Baby Pt. 1 was in any way listenable.
Even people who don’t listen to rap, who’ve at least heard a rap song, know the rhyme format usually follows a structure that resembles:
A
A
B
B
C
C
D
D
etc.
Enzo’s utter lack of flow, presence, vision, conviction or understanding of how rap works makes his repetitive occasionally-rhyming rambling seem like would be diagramed as:
A
A
BCDEFGHIJK
A
AA
E
Sonically jarring as this might be, the album could have still coasted off Enzo’s charisma if it was in any way as directed as it was during his WWE tenure. Instead, we don’t get the “Realest G in the room” behind the booth. Lifting lyrics from other rap songs for your wrestling promo can range from passable-to-enjoyable. Lifting lyrics from other rap songs on your rap song, with no indication that it’s an homage, reference or anything other than outright plagiarism - is outright biting.
Additionally, the voice he would do his wrestling interviews with only shows up on the album’s penultimate track “Elon Musk” - where on the fast tempo but soft production it sounds really out-of-place. Every other track has him alternate between whispering and slurring with a mid-album brief infatuation of this awful-sounding growl-pur adlib that sounds like a Tasmanian devil’s death rattle.
The voice isn’t the only element missing from what we had previous known of Enzo. For someone who could control tens-of-thousands in attendance at a major multi-media wrestling event with his charisma, it’s incomprehensible to attempt to decipher who he thinks he is on these tracks. Is he dollar store Drake? Counterfeit Playboi Carti? Tekashi420? Not that he’d have any way to properly communicate it as the attention deficit spoken word livejournal rant karaoke here shows a complete lack of even the slightest understanding of rap’s fundamentals.
The lyrics are really, really bad. I have to assume he recorded these songs by going into a booth and just freestyling until he found a train of thought and then attempted to craft a song out of it in real time, or he’d stumble on something clever and repeat it in hopes the engineer was talented enough to whittle a song out of a series of vocal takes. I want to believe there’s no way a human being would put a pen to paper and write this without crossing anything out. I even more want to believe a sentient person capable of speech would read these lyrics aloud and willingly take credit for them. I shudder to think at the amount of money given to the those in the studio to have to look Enzo in the eye and say “yeah, let’s go with that.”
When you match the aimlessness of the artistic aspirations with the staggering ineptitude of the rapping ability, you have some of the most irredeemable lyrics ever recorded. Even his “Everybody hates me / I’m a martyr who loves the power of love” social media personality that we heard on “Phoenix” isn’t here. Hitting play on
Rosemary’s Baby Pt. 1 just gives the listener a hard-to-follow raspy voice venturing down such questionable paths as “Top Notch’s” 8th grade sexual encounter where he received “top notch crotch,” confusing metaphors such as having “brass balls” that “sound like a cash machine” when he “jerks off” on “Brass Ring,” a song about how he’s so forgetful he’d forget everything but a particular relationship - so forgetful that he even forgot that “Forgetful” wasn’t the name of one of the Seven Dwarves but a Smurf, and dorm room pseudo-intellectualism like “Dream Girl’s” “Every sinner has a future / every angel has a past.” Toss in some stolen lines ranging from Raekwon’s to Macklemore’s and you have a a black hole of artistic integrity.
The absolute worst track is “Real1” where Enzo attempts to make a thoughtful 2Pac/J.Cole style chill groove, but comes off as the fakest most ineffective pseudo-activist this side of a Facebook’s comment’s devil’s advocate. Smack dab in the middle of a album where, as mentioned, his identity never becomes more established than a vaguely unemployable/loose cannon/sexual deviant/sump pump with no self-awareness, we’re all of a sudden supposed to believe he’s an enlightened considerate philosopher. It’s bad enough he’s blatantly stealing the George Carlin line “fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity” (which - side note- is an overrated line to begin with as no actual verb is performed “for virginity”) but then Enzo gives us his room temperature takes that nobody asked for on the NFL protests (saying if you take a knee, he’ll hold your hand while he stands - thanks Enzo, that’s a big help!) and race relations - a white guy repeating “human is my race” on a rap song addressing a major protest regarding alleged institutionalized racism is such a jaw-dropping poor call that it almost comes off as apolitical.
Outside of three references to The Rock, one nod to Ric Flair and a single mention of “the ring,” there’s nothing here to indicate Enzo’s former profession - which one would imagine would be rife with subject matter for some compelling content. Except, of course, the utter bummer that is “Liv a 30 For 30,” the foggy reflection of his long-over real life break-up with current WWE wrestler Liv Morgan. It’s written in the second-person and includes the Enzo rapping “I’m more mature than you,” which in one line is the type of all-you-can-eat buffet of cringe that would get someone rightfully ridiculed when said in the heat of the moment, let alone on a fully recorded, produced and digitally released song.
A casual half-listen may make some say “I’ve heard worse.” I assure you, you haven’t. It’s a bottomless pit of failure, made worse by the competence of everyone on the project except for Enzo. The worst part may in fact be that the project’s full name is
Rosemary’s Baby Pt. 1: Happy Birthday. Enzo’s title suggests that there’s going to be a “Pt. 2,” and given the original rumors about Enzo releasing an album slated its release for December 7, that follow-up may be coming sooner than we think. Horrifying.
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