Coi Leray - "COI" Album Review
Hip-Hop turns 50 today, and we need to talk about an aspect of the genre that drew me to it in the first place: sampling. In case it wasn’t clear from my other rap reviews, I thoroughly enjoy a well-chosen, artfully placed sample. It’s a method of retrofuturism— a way to innovate and progress the genre, but doing so by looking back on its past. Sampling can provide unique textures that acoustic instruments sometimes can’t offer or replicate, whether they’re chopped, looped, pitched, stuttered, reversed, or all of the above. In the 50 years since Hip-Hop’s inception, and as the genre has become increasingly mainstream and continues to dominate the charts today, sampling has charted a similar course, seeping into Pop, R&B, EDM, and more. With the popularity of sampling comes those who sample for creativity, and others for capital. This decade alone, there have been countless hits that piggyback off of the success of the songs they sample, and do little to no work to set themselves apart from said songs because, well, if it ain’t broke…
Enter rapper Coi Leray, who late last year released the song “Players”, a song that rips its instrumental from one of Hip-Hop’s most quintessential tracks, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”. The song has Coi attempt to return to the limelight by paying respect to Hip-Hop history, nodding to Biggie Smalls in her lyrics, among others, while asserting her femininity, equating herself and her comrades to a player— someone who has infinite side pieces but convinces each of them they’re the one— a role thought to be occupied primarily by men, as the song’s chorus snarkily points out.
The song went on to become a minor hit, and gained her some notoriety, not without the help of the continued relevance of “The Message”. While the song’s instrumental doesn’t do anything new, it still felt refreshing, especially since Coi’s 2022 album Trendsetter, despite being heavily star-studded, turned out to be quite unremarkable.
In June of this year, Coi released her latest album, COI, which features “Players”. That song, however, is not the only one in which Coi and her producers exploit the popularity of an existing hit. The album’s opener, “Bitch Girl”, makes use of Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl”, and sets the bar all too high for the album’s creativity when it comes to sample usage. The song jumps between raw and boastful bars from Leray over vocal stabs, thumping drums, and driving guitars, and an isolated awkward passage from a pitched-down Daryl Hall. From here, we’re treated to a mix of glorified nostalgia bait in between Leray’s indecisive ventures into every rising genre in this decade’s musical zeitgeist.
Coi and her team just refuse to let some of these songs be great on their own. One core member of this album’s producers read as unsurprising for me: David Guetta. Last decade, Guetta teamed up with the world’s biggest singers and rappers to dominate the charts with some of the biggest EDM-crossover hits. This decade, he has continually leeched off of the popularity of older dance hits, often removing everything that made them fun and quirky in the process. One of the biggest hits of last year, “I’m Good (Blue)” with Bebe Rexha, replaces the lyrics of Eiffel 65’s classic “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” with lackluster emotions of “good” and “alright”. No longer is the song about a little guy that lives in a blue world, but a generic wannabe clubbing anthem. Guetta and Leray have collaborated previously on the song “Baby Don’t Hurt Me”, a play on Haddaway’s “What Is Love”. On COI, their streak continues.
The song “Make My Day” decelerates a sample of the vigorous jock jam “Pump Up The Jam” to a tempo too slow to spark the same rush of adrenaline the original does. “Man’s World” turns a James Brown classic into a repetitive, uncomfortable trap-waltz hybrid on which Coi flounders. Even the songs without Guetta’s involvement that pull from iconic samples find a way to be groan-inducing. “Phuck It” warps the vocals of Daft Punk’s “Technologic” into a forced, raunchy hook that feels like a slap in the face to Daft Punk fans, much like when Drake and 21 Savage ripped “One More Time” for a song off of their collaborative album from last year, Her Loss. “My Body” takes the chorus of Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party”, also infamous sampled by Melanie Martinez for her song “Pity Party”. Coi’s rendition flips it into an empowering yet overbearing message of body positivity, winking at the audience while simultaneously flipping them off, which doesn’t inspire me to want to listen to the rest of the half-baked track.
“It's my body, I could fuck who I want to / Fuck who I want to, fuck who I want to /
It's nothin' new, you just mad it ain't you”
Coi says it herself: It’s nothing new. It nearly counts as a parody and reads like an inside joke that you get sick of hearing only by the second repetition. Her boring lyrics about curbing guys and flexing money don’t make the song any more interesting.
What about the songs that don’t use any samples? When Coi decides to experiment on this album, she does so in the safest way possible, carefully choosing which genres to weave in as if she carefully researched which regional sounds are trending in Hip-Hop right now. “Get Loud”, a song I expected to pull from Jennifer Lopez, is merely a horn-driven foray into Jersey Club, but doesn’t work in enough of the genre’s staples to feel like a worthy tribute. “Run It Up” and “Black Rose” have her attempt a rock/rage sound, but feel out of place sandwiched the playful sample-based tracks or moodier R&B songs. The featured artists on COI make better fits for the instrumentals they’re on than she does. Saucy Santana dominates “Spend It”, and the beat switch captivates more than Coi’s verse and hooks. Giggs, an actual British rapper, outshines her on “Don’t Chat Me Up”, which for some reason has Coi also doing a British accent, demanding the “ting I want”. Many other songs on this album breeze by without ever leaving a lasting impression (only 1/8 of songs on this album pass the three-minute mark).
Coi is often the subject of undeserved and misdirected hate. On top of the existing challenges of being a woman in hip-hop, she’s been the butt of many jokes involving people attending her concerts to film content centered around people doing other activities besides watching her (sleeping on the ground, e.g.). I don’t intend to lump myself in with those people, I’m a fan of Coi’s earlier work, especially her song “TWINNEM”. I just wish that her lyrics were a little more inspired, and her producers didn’t pair her with egregious samples that divert listeners’ attention away from her. Ultimately, her music does well and gets people talking, so it definitely has its audience.
