Oh yeah? is the bitter and ill-conceived comeback Steve Lacy feared

He was unashamed, crude, and, above all, bitter to the thought of adult life. I bring up such an unsavory character because he once said “If I had a dollar for every friend I’d (use your imagination), I could buy new Air Force One’s.” And here I am 7 years later, and Steve Lacy just sang the same thing.

Lacy has emerged from his fame-broiled hibernation as an especially bitter and half-baked writer, penning entire tracks indistinguishable from warehouse locker room talk. To be exact, his utterance of “If I had dollar for the friends I would fuck, I could buy a pair of really nice shoes,” opens “Nice Shoes” as the umpteenth track in a row that could work as a drunk voicemail from a toxic ex. And to my co-worker’s credit, his version at least had a slant rhyme. He finishes the tirade later with, “My dick is getting hard again at the thought of you and me holding hands.” And here I question my moral culpability in sharing this.

Oh Yeah? is replete with bad taste and questionably problematic caricatures, a record fractured by fleeting whims and the need to have every thought be laid on the most expensive of tape. It’s hubris and egoism to the most musical degrees; where one could forgive the nerve to shell out half-baked songs ala Chance the Rapper’s The Big Day by good faith alone, something nefarious emanates here pointed toward the listener, and loses that deniability.

In the depths of his 2022 fame hell, where Lacy populated headlines ranging from his record breaking “Bad Habits” hit to his complete disdain over the life-changing success it brought him, one could glean that Steve was utterly dissatisfied with his new fanbase and industry position. This record arrives as a dismantling of his position, a planned detonation of a career embattled with itself for hitting it big.

The structure of the record as it plays out is emblematic of the persona Lacy has chosen here: a suave, promising introduction to someone new that gives way to red flags and post-breakup ramblings by its closer. The first leg of the record played well into the strengths we’d thought Lacy had accrued in his off time; the opener and title track is a tuneless slacker rock mood piece that orients the vibe like a good pick-up line. There’s not much to it, and still finds room for repetition in its scant runtime, but it translates nicely into the synth-oriented singles.

“Is it Cool?” and “The Feeling” are spotless works of pop ingenuity, the type of songwriting pedigree one would expect from a multi-Grammy award winning prodigy; they’re shimmering odes to love-gone-bad and insecurity, ones that, after a complete listen, show familiar cracks forming. Lacy’s least flattering songwriting quality has always been his whiplash insisntance on smashing ideas, lyrical and musical, together in confusing ways. Tracks evolve into disparate, uncomplimentary directions, or lyrical ideas negate their own goals as tracks move along.

On “The Feeling,” Lacy’s pleading chorus to a lost love, “Am I your baby?” is later followed with “Why the fuck you gotta test my patience,” and “Drunker than a bitch, sure’d be nice to kiss you / I could let it go, but I’m not a quitter.” The simple and quite innocent love he yearns for in one place is an ugly corruption elsewhere, either a joke the audience isn’t in on or a frank showing of where Lacy personally is. Both are equally as frightening.

To bring Chance the Rapper back into our consciousness, Lacy employs a similarly youthful, jovial, and childlike delivery for lines such as, “Been a while since I had some coochie stuck in my teeth,” “I’m a big baby suckin’ on big titties,” and, “Blah blah blah blah, shut the fuck up”: all of which within 4 minutes of each other and come from no certain point of inspiration. As a vocal Sarah Silverman, it’s all the more confounding on “Nice Shoes” when Lacy, without a shred of self-awareness, remarks, “It’s lame to chase youth,” as if this record has not been a lyrical and sonic foray into that immaturity. It’s apt that the refrain of that track is an endless repetition of, “Make it stop.”

This may have been the first time since Eminem’s Revival that I didn’t have enough mental room for all the sunken lines an artist brought to the table, but the worst of the bunch is not only song ruining, but sincerely the most awe-inspiring humiliation ritual an artist has employed on a major label record this decade. Lacy closes the record with a spoken passage of, “There’s so many people I wish could hear this album. But I know they hear it, I just want to see them hear it.” Why he in his ultimate hubris would decide his least flattering record should be his most widely spread is beyond me, but he finishes, “I gotta get the fuck out. Goodbye motherfuckers.” Then the beat switches, and in his absence, the record finds a last minute of peace.

If you’re into Steve Lacy the aesthetic, you’ll find the spotless, weightless guitar pop you’re looking for, I can’t knock him there. If your TikTok-addled mind only wants “Bad Habits,” you’ll get one or two of them somewhere in here, despite Lacy’s best efforts. Oh Yeah? is either the record an artist makes when they didn’t want to write another “Bad Habits,” or the bitter record they make when they know they couldn’t write another if they tried. For the record, I don’t think that of Lacy, I just don’t know why he does.