Music review of Rod Wave’s “Soulfly”

*Not chosen for publication: point of view is lacking, no excerpt, no featured image. 

Rod Wave’s ablum “Soulfly” was recently released in 2021 (March 26).  year on the 26^th of March. Rod Wave is a young rapper that came into the rap game not too long ago. He had been rapping before but the song that actually made him how famous he is today is “Heart on Ice” from his mixtape PTSD. He had begun his rap career in 2018 and that hit song wasn’t dropped until the middle of 2019. The song went viral on all social media platforms YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.; you name it everybody was bumping this song because of how good it was. Rod Wave is from Petersburg, Florida. He was born in 1999 and is currently 21 years old. He is not only famous because of him having good songs but another reason that Rod Wave is as famous as he is, is because of his voice and how uses it and incorporate it inside of his songs. Since his coming into the rap game, he has already dropped 3 albums starting with “Ghetto Gospel” in 2019, “Pray 4 Love” in 2020, and now “Soulfly” in 2021.

In the “Soulfly” album that was release on March 26^th I thought that it was a very good album and he in this album he does a little bit more singing that usual. But some people loved it and some people didn’t like that because they expected this album to be the same as the last few albums or even mixtapes. Rod Wave dropped a few songs off the album a few weeks before the drop of the album even happened. He dropped the song “Tombstone” and “Street Runner” and from was I was seeing and hearing around everyone was very excited for this album to drop because they loved them songs and was really wanting more. Then he dropped it and the people that really like Rod Wave knew the album was going to be good, but in my opinion the album is good but it’s not his best work, I think. I think that the album that he dropped in 2019 “Pray 4 Love” is his best album and will be until he comes out with something that I think is better than that album. To me in the album “Pray 4 Love” he gives a mixture of between singing and rapping in most of the song on the album and that what I like to hear. Instead of it just being like a maybe three or four songs in an album gives like mostly half of the song on the album should be like that for me.

The songs that I think were the best on the album would have to be “Tombstone”, “Street Runner”, “Richer”, and “Soulfly”. In the song “Tombstone” he really gives deep thought about the real-life world issues throughout the song. We watched the music video in class and in the music video I feel like he made the video knowing that for people to realize who he was, he’d finally be really big in the world when he dead and gone. Which is what I think the purpose of this video was for because in the video he makes it surrounded around a colored family that were having a lot of problems. There were two parents and a child that was deaf, and it shows that this family was really struggling in the world. The father was just sitting there doing nothing and supposedly watching the kid while the mother was at work and not doing much for the family. Then when it became time for the family to eat the father had spit out the food that the mother had prepared for them to eat that night. He then got up and said something that look to be very disrespectful toward the mother and hit her. At the end of the video the kid of the family was walking down the street and two cops had stop and told him to freeze but they didn’t know that he couldn’t hear, and he keep walking and one of the cops had shot the kid and the kid died. This Video really goes with the song in my opinion because when you are gone people really want to give you all the praise in the world but when you here on the earth people tend to bash you or they don’t want to see you succeed in this world. He also said that “Remember times got so hard, I got it tattooed (So hard)” say that time tend to get real hard in life and you have to be able to push through and get through those times.

In the song “Richer ft. Polo G” is a song that’s telling people that the people with no money need to stop lying to the world about having the money “N***** ain’t getting’ no money, tell ‘em quit the cappin’” were the words of how he put it. And saying that he was a kid from the bottom (didn’t have anything) now he has things that he wants and telling the other that lying about having all that stuff to stop doing all of that cappin”. Now in my final favorite song in the album “Street Runner” he has a video showing him basically being a street runner and going on a bunch of trips throughout the United States and basically give some love language which I another reason why I like the song. Like in the song he was saying that “Sorry I missed your call while, I was on a jet” talking about a girl that was calling him and he wasn’t able to pick up the phone. During this part of the song, I feel like he was singing to the person he was talking to and the instruments that were in the background was a soft piano playing with some bass behind hit. This song could have been a little heart-breaking song coming from a girl’s perspective because he’s saying in the song that “Hey, I’m kinda glad that you didn’t pick up”. Saying that in that part of the lyric that he’s missing the person so much that he’s glad that they didn’t answer the phone because he really misses that person.

All in all, I like a few songs on the album “Soulfly” not really a big fan of the entire album, but I would listen to it because I am a fan of Rod Wave. He gives real life situations that happen in people life on an everyday basis, and he puts all of his feeling and emotions inside of his songs. Which people can tell by the way he sings the lyrics he writes.

This piece is part of the on-going series “The Social and Political Commentary of Music Reviews,” which is part of an Alternative Journalism course at Tulane University taught by Dr. Christine Capetola.