#been havin

Been Havin bears only a distant resemblance with the “Coochie” song, even though YN’s main features as an artist remain. If you want to hear “Coochie” again and again, you’ll hardly want to past the first three tracks. On Been Havin, YN Jay is on what he’s called an album mode. Taken apart, these songs are headscratchers: undercooked, wobbly (one of the tracks here is called “Wobble Wobble Jiggle Jiggle”) and loose. Yet glued together as one piece of music they make up a solid work from an artist who is not afraid to make risky moves. YN Jay is perfectly willing to crack a vulgar joke, rhyme the same word multiple times (he rhymes “school” 4 times and “shit” 5 times on “Coochie Funk”, and it works) and come up with a goofy chorus. Though he rapped before “Coochie,” that was an amateur-ish affair. Only on his later tapes, like Been Havin, has he stopped screaming in the mic, smoothed his flow, improved his wordplay. This puts him somewhere in the camp between street rappers and outcasts who make Soundcloud rap in their bedrooms. Sadly, quite a lot of “street” rap fans ignore YN Jay exactly because his music is too outlandish for them. Here, he is at his best on chill-and-sit-back tracks like “I Did That,” “Dance Moves,” and “Coochie Funk.”

“Most Influential Artist Award” may be the worst song here, but its title is telling. Jay really did a few influential things in hip hop: he was the first who began to put failed lines into songs, he acted as a weirdo when everybody wanted their artists tough and brutal, and he got back into the game rhyming the same word. And all this was overlooked. Because of “Coochie.” That damn song.