Nav’s Bad Habits: NOT GOOD

[Intro: Anthony Fantano, (Cal Chuchesta)]
Uh, this Nav album, it's, uh...

(No, please, anything but this! You're doing it two times to my boy!)

It's...

(The greatest! Rapper! Of! All! Time!)

It's not good.

[Review: Anthony Fantano]
Nav is a songwriter, rapper, and auto-crooner from the great country of Canada. This is his latest full-length album, I first heard of this dude back in 2017 through his self-titled LP. This album didn't really strike me as anything special at the time, and there wasn't really any reason to kind of ring the alarms just hearing another forgettable, nondescript auto-croon trap record. I hear so many of those week in and week out. Again, hearing another one wasn't really a big deal around the time this record came out. I mostly remember focusing on other things.

Shortly after the release of this record, we had the Nav and Metro Boomin collab Perfect Timing, and then in 2018 Nav's profile seemed to grow with the release of his next full-length album, Reckless. Which I did end up covering. I said the album was...not good. And the reason I ended up talking about this record was the hype building behind Nav on this album.

Let me put it this way: when it comes to Nav's last full-length album, I'm not really sure if there's a nice thing I can say. The instrumentals and the beat choices Nav makes on this record absolutely suck. Totally bland, totally run of the mill, nothing fun or exciting or hard-hitting or even intoxicating about them. I'm not saying Nav's instrumentals are like the worst thing I've ever heard in my life, but there's absolutely positively nothing special about them whatsoever.

Then let's move on to Nav's singing, his rapping, the vocals generally, which are about as expressionless as I think current-day vocals in hip-hop get. During a time when it seems like rappers are doing everything they can to stand out and be wild and be crazy and scream their brains out and go absolutely mad, Nav is kind of an anomaly. I actually likened his vocals on his last record to that of a robot mimicking the sound of a human voice.

When it comes to the substance of Nav's songs, there's not really anything particularly special about that either. Just very by the numbers and run of the mill braggadocio and delusions of grandeur, which is typical for this style of music, typical for this genre, not necessarily a bad thing. But typically bold claims in hip-hop come along with bold wordplay, bold flows, bold personalities that make it all kind of believable.

Now I know up until this point I've been talking a lot about Nav's sound, his style, his last album, and the reason I've hung in this area for so long is that pretty much everything that applies to Nav's last record also applies to this new album over here. His voice is still incredibly nasal, incredibly flat, horrid, emotionless, absolutely boring. At this moment in time I still cannot name a more boring rapper and singer in hip-hop than Nav.

I think Nav is hip-hop's most nonessential character at the moment. There's absolutely nothing that his music, his sound, his style brings to the table. He picks the most run of the mill, forgettable beats, his songs and his structures are very plain, very basic. The energy he brings to his songs is for the most part nonexistent.

I guess what I can give Nav on this album is that there are some bars and lines that are unintentionally funny, like on the track "I'm Ready" where he literally says (wheezing) "What's the game without me?" Like you literally bring nothing to the game right now. On top of it, you, like, quit a while ago. Like, you claimed that you were quitting music, and the entire internet clowned you. If Nav never came out with another album ever again, the game would look exactly the same. It would progress the exact same way. Arguably, Nav's biggest point of exposure was at the end of that Travis Scott song where everybody made a huge joke of how low he was mixed. Also, on the track "Taking Chances", Nav drops this bar about selling his soul, but if Nav has had a soul, I have not heard it yet - not on one of his songs.

He has the audacity to put a song on this thing titled "Price On My Head", and this song actually features The Weeknd, who delivers, believe it or not, an absolutely horrid feature. Throughout his vocal passages he's kind of, like, slipping back and forth in between this falsetto-castrato vocal range, and it's, ugh, easily some of the worst vocals he's laid to tape. But still, even with me not caring for Abel's voice that much on this track, hearing him is actually kind of a breath of fresh air from the soulless and monotone and absolutely mind-numbing rapping and singing from Nav for the duration of this album.

In fact, nearly every feature on this record is a nice breath of fresh air from Nav's horribly boring voice. Meek Mill provides a pretty decent feature on here, and Young Thug goes way harder on this record than he ever really needed to. He also admits to wanting to have sex with his aunt, so, there's also that. There's an unexpected beat switch on this track that, miraculously somehow, makes the song worse. You would figure it would be the opposite given how one-dimensional most of the songs on this thing are, and that maybe a switch would kind of bring a nice change of pace, make the songs on this thing more dynamic, but no, it actually becomes more difficult to listen to.

Sadly, the album doesn't get any better as it progresses in its final moments. The song "Why You Crying Mama", despite the lyrics being as heartfelt and as personal as they are, Nav doesn't really put any more heart into this track than he does any other song here. It's just as flat and as boring and as sonically nondescript as the rest of the record.

I will say the closing track and the track "Dior Runners", both of these songs have beats that go relatively hard, much harder than some of the other cuts on the record, and Nav brings some decent flows to these songs as well, but Jesus, like, he really does need more than just, like, an okay flow and an okay beat to get by. There needs to be something there interesting in terms of the lyrics. It doesn't even need to be deep or substantive or conscious or anything like that. I don't know, something clever, something funny, an observation of some type. Something titillating or exciting or fun. And still, just, the vocal delivery is absolutely drab.

Honestly I'm in a really weird place right now, because I want to say that Nav is the most forgettable rapper working today. But I feel like in how uniquely forgettable and run of the mill he is, he somehow has created an identity. He is unique in that he literally has so little going for him artistically speaking. He's, like, so devoid of anything interesting going on in his music, it's actually kind of shocking. Yeah, honestly, shocked, despite how many songs and how many projects this guy has under his belt, and he still cannot come up with a compelling track.

If you put a gun in my mouth and you told me to write down the characteristics of a Nav song, the only thing I could think to write down would be "Just make sure nothing absolutely stands out, and just make sure you have a very tiny, nasally voice with an utter lack of emotion." I mean, some people have tried to sell me on the idea that "Hey, this new record of his, it's his best record, it's better than his last album", but no. This still sucks. Maybe the beats are a bit bigger and they hide the flaws of Nav's voice a bit better, but geez, like, that's it. This new Nav album, it's not good.

[Outro: Anthony Fantano]
- sition. Have you given this album a listen? Did you love it, did you hate it? What would you rate it? You're the best, you're the best. What should I review next? Hit the like if you like. Please subscribe and please don't cry. Hit the bell as well. Over here next to my head is another video that you can check out, hit that up or the link to subscribe to the channel. Anthony Fantano, Nav...Bad Habits...not good.