Do you hate hip hop but love irony? Then Lakutis is for you! Of course this should come as no surprise from an emcee coming out of the Das Racist camp. It should also come as no surprise that the press releases regarding his debut EP is just as steeped in everything you learn to hate about PR, where idiots try to convince you that because he has a look and you can put all sorts of labels on him, that he should be enjoyed. Frankly, I don’t care if he’s a “quintessential New York dirt bag,” and I don’t care if he spent time “honing his death freak and getting in touch with his inner blood eagle.” That’s supposed to make me like his music?! What about lyrical content, delivery, production, arrangement, or any other factors that actually makes the music worth listening to?

After listening to I’m In The Forest, I can tell you that Lakutis suffers from the same problem that other ironic hipsters such as Spank Rock and his friends in Das Racist have - making bad or offensive music on purpose doesn’t make it smart or good by default. When Lakutis opens the EP with “Lakutis in the House,” and says, “This is the part where I talk shit to everyone,” and then proceeds to tell a list of people to go fuck themselves, he just plays into the stereotype that he’s supposedly making fun of. He doesn’t take the opportunity to subvert the situation in a clever way to make us think about this trapping in hip hop, and he doesn’t call out anyone interesting, he’s just simply participating. Another factor to the appeal of Lakutis is the school of thought that by spouting a bunch of nonsense that rhymes that includes pop culture references, that’s also brilliant, because it’s postmodern, absurdist, or whatever label you want to project on it. Why? Is whatever statement you can draw from this really that powerful? Are we privileging him just because he’s playing up his Russian heritage to portray himself as an outsider to get away with this? Is the production so amazing that people just overlook the fact that he’s just not good at rapping? Well, the work that Chaz Van Queen, Fonda, and Dash Speaks contribute isn’t bad, but it’s no so amazing that I can overlook Lakutis’s shortcomings. And that only accounts for three of the seven songs on the EP. The collaboration with Kool A.D. of Das Racist on “I’m Better Than Everybody,” produced by Big Baby Gandhi is the worst combination of elements, as they use a generic Dirty South beat to repeatedly declare “I’m better than everybody - shut the fuck up!” This isn’t secretly brilliant, it’s loudly ignorant and obnoxious.

He’s only begun his career, but he’s already become what he’s attempting to making fun of with his first EP, if you want to give him that much credit. Is there a place for irony in hip hop? Absolutely! Just look at artists like Busdriver or Open Mike Eagle. Is there a place for more subpar, offensive and nonsensical hip hop? I would say we have enough already. If Lakutis is capable of more than this, I’d love to hear it. If he’s just going to make blatantly offensive hip hop on purpose and wait for us to receive it as brilliant, let’s not do him the favor.