Asleep In The Bread Aisle - Asher Roth

“Asleep in the Bread Aisle” is the debut album from Pennslyvanian rapper Asher Roth. It was released in April 2009 through Universal records but didn’t do particularly well anywhere outside the US. However there was a lot of internet hype over him in the run up to release. I decided I had to at least give his album a listen (because the internet is NEVER wrong) to satisfy my own curiosity more than having a liking for any of his music. Quite the ...
...Love College”, and I probably should have took that as a hint that I wouldn’t like his album either.

Roth has two things that set him apart from the vast majority of other rappers: his skin complexion (he’s white); and his upbringing (middle class suburbs). His skin tone will draw inevitable comparisons with Eminem, and Roth addresses this subject on track number eight of this album. He stays true to his upbringing throughout too, never ... more

“Asleep in the Bread Aisle” is the debut album from Pennslyvanian rapper Asher Roth. It was released in April 2009 through Universal records but didn’t do particularly well anywhere outside the US. However there was a lot of internet hype over him in the run up to release. I decided I had to at least give his album a listen (because the internet is NEVER wrong) to satisfy my own curiosity more than having a liking for any of his music. Quite the opposite in fact; I didn’t like his first single, “I Love College”, and I probably should have took that as a hint that I wouldn’t like his album either.

Roth has two things that set him apart from the vast majority of other rappers: his skin complexion (he’s white); and his upbringing (middle class suburbs). His skin tone will draw inevitable comparisons with Eminem, and Roth addresses this subject on track number eight of this album. He stays true to his upbringing throughout too, never trying to be anything he’s not – there are no gangster tunes on this CD. However, although I think it’s great that he’s staying true to himself, a middle class upbringing isn’t particularly interesting. This is painfully obvious in his subject matter, or lack of it. Unfortunately, the most original aspect of this album is the cover artwork. It features him sleeping on some bread, which is located in a bread aisle. It’s genius how they make these things tie in with the title.

1. Lark On My Go-Kart – 3/5
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The album opener is arguably the most important track on the CD. People tend to make a quick judgement on the entire album based off of it, and it’s unlikely they will move too far from that provided what follows is around the same standard. This track was a good choice to be first up; it epitomises what “Asleep in the Bread Aisle” is about. Roth likes to try and add some humour into his lyrics, although most of the time it doesn’t really work out. Sometimes it’s due to what he says being too obvious or played out, other times because it was just really lame, or occasionally it goes over the listener’s head. In this track mostly the latter is to blame, but also sometimes it just wasn’t funny.

It’s packed full of pop culture references – American pop culture references. Fair enough, he is American after all. It’s refreshing to hear references like the ones found on this track, although he does seem to pull stuff out at random indicating a lack of cohesive thought process. Or perhaps there’s a link that I don’t see because I don’t know who half these people are. Pretty much the whole of the first two verses flew past me, no clue what’s going on. So I’ll just talk about the second two where he sticks to Mario Kart and Cheetos. I can just about get my head around that. I’ll speculate that he gradually ran out of pop culture-ish stuff to say because, looking at the lyrics, the number of people he name drops per verse falls off throughout the track. By the time we get the fourth and final verse there aren’t any at all. He falls back on the topic of women instead.

I will give him Kudos on the way the completed track sounds though. I don’t like this album, but this is one of only three tracks that I would be ok with listening to on a regular basis. Two reasons for this: his flow sounds confident and “normal” (this will mean more after the next two tracks); and his lyrics are not as basic as they are on the rest of the album. It’s a quite light hearted song, but he has some decent wordplay in there:

“Mario kart skills are outrageous
Play me any day and I'll be the best racist
Wait no erase it; I meant to say racer”

The next line subtracts from this a little because he seems to be saying it only because “pager” rhymes with “racer”, but I’ll let that one slide just this once.

2. Blunt Cruisin’ – 1/5
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We make it to track number two before we get a song about drugs. Being middle class, Roth’s drug of choice is weed. On a side note, this album reminds me of the Where’s Wally? books – be on the lookout for a weed reference on every track. Some are more subtle than others but if you listen hard enough you’ll find it eventually. So really we make it to track number two before we’re formally informed about the weed hunt.

There’s plenty to hate about this track, hence the rating. I’ll kick off with some statistical analysis. The track’s total playing time is 3:36. The two verses take up a combined 48 seconds of this (the first is 26 seconds, the last four seconds shorter). This can be expressed as a percentage: 22.22% of this track consists of verse, 77.78% consists of either chorus, “hide the weed, ho” or assorted talking. From these numbers it’s easy to see why it gets so repetitive. Once you’ve heard the opening minute you’ve heard over three quarters of the entire song, and it’s not like the chorus is packed full of variation either. The same lines get repeated numerous times. If you listen to the whole track all the way through you’ll hear:
“hide the weed, ho” eight times;
“you know we be blunt cruisin’” eight times;
“yo we cruisin’” twelve times.
This guy needs to learn to edit and invest in a thesaurus. Maybe I will mail him one. It’s almost as if he came up with three different potential hooks, but instead of selecting just one to use he went with all three of them one after the other.

His flow and rhyme scheme are appalling too. I think he’s going for the “see how I’m flowing really slowly? That’s because I’m high off my weed. I’m so cool!” attitude. It’s annoying because I can’t help thinking that if he went faster, I would get to hear the second first before the first verse gets dumped from my short term memory. Speaking of the second verse, I would like to nominate it for the worst verse of the year award. I have to wait 2:13 before I can listen to it, and it turns out to be complete and utter crap. A short extract:

“Where’s the dutch at? Homie, pass that shit
Not like that, homie ash that shit
can you turn this song up? Homie, ash that shit”

Roth rhymes “homie, ash that shit” with “homie, ash that shit”...I see a Grammy in his future. Jumping back to my statistics, that extract is half of the second verse. Three lines. Half a verse. It’s unbelievable. That’s only allowed when there are lots and lots of little verses, not on a track like this.

3. I Love College – 2/5
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The lead single. The track people will associate with this album. His introduction to the public. The one made to draw in fans. The song that is supposed to secure album sales. On it, Roth does his best Steve Stifler impression. This is a track about college life, one that frat boys across the globe will raise their glasses to and chant “chug chug chug” along with him. It paints a picture that we’ve all seen and heard a million times before; there’s nothing new here. Not that I have anything against the status quo – as long as it’s done well, that is. Roth again displays his lack of lyrical prowess, but that’s not too much of an issue on this type of track. I’m not looking for deep lyrics or a rhyme scheme so complex I need to form a support group to help me listen to it. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect something better than this. This man has after all secured a record deal with a major label. The lyrics themselves are far too simplistic, and, in a track that relies predominantly on one syllable rhymes, he shouldn’t have to manipulate the way words are pronounced in order to achieve his one syllable. The second half of this stanza is a prime example:

“So fill up my cup, let's get fucked up
I'm next on the table, who want what?
I am champion [champ – e – ON] at beer pong
Allen IversON, Hakeem OlajuwON”

The flow found on “Blunt Cruisin’” comes back to haunt again on this track, but it seems Roth got some practice in this time around. It’s not quite as horrific, or maybe the beat helps mask it better. I think he meant to give the track a laidback feel but he winds up sounding like he’s bored out of his mind – perfect for a track about partying, ehh? It’s exaggerated slowness, in part due to the small amount of words he has in each bar. There are a few dramatic pauses, such as the one between these two lines at the start of the second verse: “I can't tell you what I learned from school but [pause] / I could tell you a story or two, um [pause] /“. It’s kind of sad that he can’t think of anything to fill up the space in such short bars. On a more positive note, the beat is quite good. The guitar works really well; it did a better job of creating a laidback mood than Asher Roth did!

4. La Di Da – 2/5
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We’ve reached the track about Roth’s struggle to make it as a hip hop artist. Obviously, through no fault of his own, this is going to be somewhat less shocking than that of other artists who came from more challenging backgrounds. Not to worry. Unless you’re already famous and making the acting to music cross over, or living off of Daddy (Paris Hilton), it’s never easy to get signed and get a record out. It would be interesting to hear a different perspective on the song every artist has done at least once.

Unfortunately, this track doesn’t even come remotely close to that. This is due to the way he approached the song. It really needed to be done from a story telling perspective, maybe having a couple of verses going through a few months or whatever of what he did to get signed. I’m reliably informed from the minions of anonymous internet geeks who edit Wikipedia that he added Scooter Braun as a friend on MySpace and it went from there. Then again, I’m also told he’s 21 (he’s not). I’m pretty sure no other MC has got their big break that way; it would have been good to hear a track about that and the events before or after. Instead he goes about it the way he went about all the other tracks on the album, except “His Dream” and “Fallin’”, which in my opinion was the wrong thing to do. The song suffers because of this, not because of a lack of subject matter.

To give him some credit, the first half of the track is well written. Rhyme scheme aside (he needs to get a more complex one), his lines are on point:

“Life without struggling, yeah right
Make one mistake? Won’t make that twice
Out of sight, out of mind, find yourself out of time
Buy your own pants, get your hands out of mine”

Ok, so he’s not going to set the world on fire. It still makes for an enjoyable listen and got my hopes up that maybe he would be able to come through. Unfortunately, he is unable to carry this style across to the second verse. It’s a double edged sword: maybe if he had more to talk about he would have been more successful. Hypothetically, it would have made for a stand out track. A light hearted song about the struggle to make it would have been one I’d be playing often.

5. Be By Myself ft Cee-Lo – 2/5
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Here we learn Asher Roth wants to remain uncommitted to a woman. There’s nothing original about the concept to the track, which means Roth has got to stand out through his lyrics in order to get noticed. There’s little to suggest so far that he’ll be able to do that and, sure enough, there’s nothing memorable coming out of his mouth on this track either.

The things that stands out most to me are the soul sounding, guitar based beat and Cee-Lo (from Gnarls Barkley) on the hook. Both put in good performances, although I think that Cee-Lo’s hook would end up annoying me if I listened to this track regularly. I don’t, so it’s still good with me. Roth probably had nothing to do with either of these components.

It’s hard for me to describe Roth’s lyrics without repeating myself: they’re still basic; he’s still dependant on a one syllable rhyme scheme; and he still tries to be funny but mostly isn’t.

“But if you don’t get mad when I get fat
Cause all I do is eat, drink, smoke weed and rap
And then play Madden, and then dag
You’re pretty rad and I take it all back”

His rhyme scheme seems to be pretty much the same on every track, just slightly adapted to fit the speed of his flow and/or beat. It would be good to hear him try some variation at some point, for kicks. Actually, it would be good to hear him rhyme some multi-syllable words. I’m not holding my breath on that one. Oh well, at least he seems to have left the “Blunt Cruisin’” flow behind him.

6. She Don’t Wanna Man ft Keri Hilson – 1.5/5
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This track has exactly the same concept as the previous one, except this time it’s the girl who wants to be by herself. I’m not sure whose genius move it was to highlight this complete lack of any original thought process by putting the two songs next to each other, but I expect they were being paid to do it. I wish someone would pay me to organise this track list, but I guess it would be a rather empty album. Some things are just common sense: you want them as far away from each other as possible. Or off the album all together please.

It seems I spoke too soon with regards to his flow too. Roth uses his slow motion kind on this track as well. I don’t like it anyway, but to hear him use it over as nice a techno style beat as this almost seems like it should be a criminal offense. It’s as if that’s what he does when he had no idea how to ride the beat properly. To make matters worse, this is presumably a club track. A slow flow isn’t really going to get the party jumping.

The girl on the hook shows him up completely. She and her two lines steal the show. She alone earned this track an extra 0.5 on the score, but also because “Blunt Cruisin’” set a new standard for the 1/5. I’m not sure any track will ever be able to live up to that bench mark. Roth’s lyrics on here are at his normal standard:

“Quiet and confident, not a bit I’m the shit
Screaming ow! out loud, right now I’m the shit
Let them know, let it go
Feeling sexy, feeling grown
I be sipping on patron mixed with pineapple”

Firstly, it’s ok to lie about what you’re drinking if the truth doesn’t rhyme with anything else in your verse. It’s a song, not an autobiography. Secondly, it’s very easy to get lines to rhyme when you end them both in exactly the same way. It’s also very lame. Plenty of things rhymes with “shit,” come up with something different please.

7. Sour Patch Kids – 2/5
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This is Roth’s attempt at a socio-political track. He aims it mostly at poverty, but there isn’t anything insightful about the track as a whole. At times he comes off as being under informed on the very issues he attempts to tackle:

“If we go hungry in our own country
I wonder what it’s like living in Hungary?”

This extract could be Roth attempting to throw in a joke, which makes the track lose some credibility when you consider the message it’s trying to put out. Or perhaps he intends it to be a very clever jab at the American education system and the lack of awareness of the problems faced by others. If that was his intention, that changes my opinion on this line considerably, but I very much expect the former to be the case. There’s nothing on this album that would make me think otherwise.

“Poor get poor, the rich just get richer
Get the jist, you see the big picture?”

There’s nothing new about this statement. We’ve all heard it said before by numerous different people. I’m not expecting anything revolutionary, but if he’s going to do a track like this he needs to research it a bit. Google. Use it.

“This is some sick shit, slightly twisted
Information from our nation’s capital
Capitol is all the captain calls for”

Again, nothing new. Guys like Immortal Technique made their hip hop careers out of dissing the US government and calling it corrupt in a far more convincing and hard hitting way than this. I give him some points for trying to make a difference and perhaps it will raise awareness amongst the very young, but in the grand scheme of things this is a very weak effort when compared with other songs of this nature. That’s the problem when you do tracks on unoriginal topics: people won’t listen to yours unless it’s a good track. They’ll listen to one of the other, better ones. The rules of supply and demand win out.

8. As I Em ft Chester French – 3/5
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This is the track where Roth addresses the Eminem comparisons that he has faced. In my opinion this would have been best as track number one, if only for the ending of the final verse: “If you have no other questions and can’t think of other thoughts / I’d like to introduce you to Asher Paul Roth.” It’s best to deal with “the elephant in the room” at the albums outset, surely? Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, this is a decent track. It’s well written and well put together, especially the final verse. We’re on track number eight and there is finally a verse on this album that impresses me. Congratulations. The first and second are both decent, but he doesn’t say a whole lot. The basis of his argument for why he’s different seems to be ‘I don’t like it, I’m not Eminem, please believe me!’ It’s hardly convincing. Problem is he sounds exactly like Eminem. By that I mean his voice, not his song content:

“Cause we have the same complexion and a similar voice inflection
It’s easy to see the pieces and to reach for that connection”

That sums up it up really. I think he would have been better off combing the first and second verses into one (and therefore editing some of it out). Instead he could have used the second verse to highlight the differences between them.

There was a guy called Fokissed who was heavily promoting himself on the internet around 2004/5. I have no idea where he ended up, but he had a track where he addressed the comparisons people made of him. The track in question was called “You Must Be Mistaken.” He did impressions of those rappers while rhyming about how he wasn’t them, for example on Eminem he said “my mum might be crazy but she’s not psychotic / I might be high off of life but not off narcotics.” A verse with something along these lines was needed on this one. When it comes down to it, I’d rather listen to the track by guy who doesn’t have an album out than this one by Asher Roth, who does.

9. Lion’s Roar ft New Kingdom and Busta Rhymes – 2/5
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Busta Rhymes is the only big name feature on the whole album (sorry Cee-Lo), so he gets to be criticised first. Coincidentally, he had an album coming out within a month of Asher Roth releasing this called “Back on my B.S.” I’m sure it’s just a coincidence and he would absolutely have been on this track had he not needed to use this opportunity to self promote, and that it was Roth who wanted him to say “Busta bust and I’m back on my bullshit” right before his verse began. Yeah, no. Anyway he does his verse and it’s nothing particularly special, yet it’s still better than the two that Roth did. The song is about sex and girls, Roth sounds awkward talking about it but Busta’s main advantage is that he doesn’t.

New Kingdom is on the hook. The beat and flow used on the verses are both fast paced and energetic. In contrast, the hook is slow. It sounds really out of place on this track because of this. It’s not particularly imaginative either, but seems to drag on for a while due to the pacing used. I would say Roth put in a better performance than New Kingdom, just about.

Finally, Asher Roth himself. As I said he sounds a bit awkward talking about sex. When comparing his verses to that of Busta’s, it’s evident that Busta goes for it more:

“Let me pound on the coochie until it gets sore
Then I laugh and cough when I flash and floss” – Busta Rhymes

“Ready now get set cause you get no rest
I'ma smack that butt, I'ma grab them breasts” – Asher Roth

He’s quite tame in comparison. However, I like the variation in the speed of the track. I’ve spent a lot of time criticising his slow flow, so it’s only fair I credit him here that he shows ability to rap quickly. Unfortunately the track isn’t very good, but I’ve come to accept that will be the case with most of this album.

10. Bad Day ft Jazze Pha – 1/5
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Remember how I was saying Roth likes to add humour into his tracks? This is where the humour is supposed to come in thick and fast. It’s a tale of a bad day, with everything going wrong. There are lots of potentially funny stories that could be used on a track like this. This seems to be the type of song Roth would excel in. Yet, he doesn’t.

His day consists of travelling on an aeroplane in an aisle seat, with a child behind him screaming and an obese man sitting next to him. Oh yeah and he forgot his iPod. After being unable to go to the bathroom because he needed the toilet when the seat belt lights come on, someone he went to school with starts talking to him in Baggage Claim. At the hotel, he finds he has to pay to watch movies and when there is a knock at the door it turns out the visitor isn’t a Spanish whore. My sides are splitting. Yawn.

“Four hours of turbulence [turb-u-lANCE]
We land when I’m about to turd in my pants
But the captain is seat belt fastened
So my ass is just passing gas”

This is one of the weakest attempts at a funny track I’ve heard in a long while. The aeroplane story is very cliché, the bathroom issue is kind of childish, and so is being upset at having to pay to watch movies. No comment on the visitor.

The way he delivers his lines makes him sound bored and emotionless.

11. His Dream – 4/5
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This was an unexpected surprise. Just as I lost all hope, he pulls a good track out of absolutely nowhere.

It’s an ode to his father, the sacrifices he made for his family, and the support he showed to Roth when he tried to make it as a rap artist. It’s deeply personal, and he conveys the emotion he feels very well in his delivery. This track shows that there is some hope for this guy. Story telling is where his true talent lies, not in the tracks that he’s packed his debut album full of.

Unfortunately, a track like this is aimed at a different kind of audience. I completely understand that, although I think this is a great track and it’s very well written, the bulk of his fan base are unlikely to share this view. This level of introspection isn’t compatible with songs like “I Love College” and “Blunt Cruisin’”. He’s made the mistake of trying to appeal to every section of music fan instead of just focusing on one group. You can’t please everyone after all.

“His only son is only twenty-one
And focus as a poet has only just begun
Papa isn’t dumb, he understands what this means
His dream is my dream, my dream is his dream”

Maybe he felt he had to put this track on here. It sounds like he has a lot of admiration and respect for his father, and perhaps he felt he needed to thank him publically. Whatever the reason, I’m glad this track made the cut. It makes me feel like this album wasn’t a complete waste of time after all.

12. Fallin’ – 4/5
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This is another really good track. It’s about his love for hip hop and how it all started for him. I felt “La Di Da” should have been written along the same lines as this, but I got my wish eventually on this song instead. What’s most commendable about the track is Roth’s delivery. There is real emotion in what he says:

“Then came high school
Started picking up a mic, thought I was cool
My friends said ‘homie you know that your white? Dude’
I said ‘what? Fa real?’ Oh it's all good”

The lyrics themselves aren’t that brilliant (notice the rhyme scheme), but he breaths excellent emotion into what he says and that is what makes this song so memorable. It also makes me look back on other tracks and think What If? Maybe I’d think better of them if he delivered the words the way he does here. It shows that it’s not that he can’t do it, he just chooses not to.

It’s also the track where his need to use humourous similes and metaphors turns out to be most successful:

“Ballpoint pen, minds spinning like a whirlwind
Getting on the mic, I'm a wizard like Merlin
Breaking barriers, tearing walls like it's Berlin”

Also, there’s some two syllable rhymes going on there. It’s almost as if this and the previous track were written by a completely different person. If he realises this is what he’s best at and adapts his music to this type of style, Asher Roth may be able to one day live up to his internet billing. If he doesn’t realise it, or he chooses to ignore it, then he won’t. It’s as simple as that.

And So...

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Overall, this is a weak album. Roth’s lyrics are very basic and so is his rhyme scheme. When he does finally make two good tracks, they break from his ‘style’ and will therefore probably not be that well received by his core fan base at which the other ten tracks are aimed.

He doesn’t live up the hype that surrounded him and, as much as I hate to turn this into a race thing, if he was black there’s no way he would have been hyped up at all. I’ll go one step further and say that he wouldn’t have had a record deal either, and this album would never have been made. There are a lot of other hip hop artists out there who are far better than Asher Roth who don’t have album deals.

Finally, to address the Eminem comparisons, Roth is like Eminem in voice only. No people die on this album, nobody gets raped, and weed is the only drug he uses. He does like to tell everyone about it though. There is some swearing, albeit in a much smaller quantity and of a softer variety, so maybe you could call this guy a PG, watered down version of Shady.

Album Details
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Price: £7.98 from Amazon
Number of tracks: Depends which version you have:-
US Import = 12 (this is the version I have)
UK = 13 (Bonus track: Y.O.U featuring Slick Rick)
iTunes = 14 (Bonus tracks: Perfectionist and The Lounge) 

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