Notes from the Undergound album opener ‘Dead Bite’ boasts this little snippet (among others): “Let me buy you a drink; how ’bout a roofie [date rape drug], gin and tonic? It’s terribly misogynistic and offensive. So does it deserve a rigid public outcry like the one that that pantomime villain Yo Yo Honey Singh got? What, then, of Axl Rose (GNR), allegedly a renowned misogynist and all-round bad egg, who was received whole-heartedly by tens of thousands just last month? And Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), who – albeit with irony – wrote and sang “Polly” from the POV of a rapist who’s abducted a young girl? Perverted a-hole/sicko. All those clubs playing commercial hip-hop, a chunk of which uses ‘bitchez and hos’ as a starting premise, and glorifies violence
Coming back to Hollywood Undead though, the music holds its own minus the Linkin Park-esque lapses into filtered and overcommodified rap-poprock. There’s spunk, energy, a clusterfudge of influences (rap, hip-hop, rock, pop, R&B, even some hardcore) spliced together, and a genuine groove throughout. The multiple rap deliveries are interspersed with melody and an airtight rhythmic intensity to create a very dynamic record, with aforementioned ‘Dead Bite’ and ‘From the Ground’ really sticking out. The lyrics, of course, are a different story, rendering the Dostoyevsky reference feeble and out of place.