Playing With Fire is the debut and so-far only album by one Kevin Federline. If you’re not familiar with Federline, he was the back-up dancer that Britney Spears married because she needed someone to spend all her money and fill her with gross wigger jizz. The album’s Wikipedia page describes Federline as both a rapper and an “American personality”. That’s great. I’m going to start calling myself that. Like, if I’m ever asked to describe what I do, I’m going to say that I’m an American personality. This is 2008, people. You can totally do that now.

Federline originally positioned himself under the MC name “K-Fed” and – as one would hope and expect – was mocked relentlessly by the media. Note that he drops the moniker for this album in favor of his full name, clearly telling you of the classy, professional content that you’ll find within. (NOT) On a side note, “Kevin Federline” is the worst rap name ever. And he actually refers to himself a few times on the album under his whole name. Sorry, Kev, but Kanye can only get away with not using a stagename because his name isn’t “Federline”, which sounds like some bizarre, German, cheese-centric dish.

Playing With Fire is where I decided to begin because it’s widely regarded as one of the biggest musical failures of the past decade. The album is the lowest rated album on Metacritic since it’s inception in 1999, and sold a mere 16,000 copies before they took the CD out of production. According to Wikipedia:

The “Playing with Fire” concert tour was also a commercial disaster. In New York City, Federline performed before an estimated audience of 300 out of a total seating capacity of 1,500 at Webster Hall, with only one-third of attendees remaining by the end of the concert. Although many of the tickets were given away for free, approximately three-quarters of the seats at his Chicago performance remained empty. Four of the eight scheduled tour performances (Cleveland, Atlantic City, Anaheim, and San Diego) were ultimately canceled.

Ouch. At least he actually, shockingly enough, has a long-running and still active fan blog. Its author claimed that K-Fed’s album is “probably some of the most sincere urban storytelling you’ll hate to admit you like.” LOLgasm. I’m surprised that they had enough time to write that review, considering that they must’ve been busy buying those 16,000 CDs that no one else in the world could logically want to buy. Actually, on second thought, that blog is probably run by K-Fed himself.

K-Fed’s tag cloud at Last.fm should give you a pretty good idea of how people usually respond to his music:

Before delving into the gooey innards of Playing With Fire, let’s take a look at a Brief History of White Boy Rapping.

An important resource for all white boy rappologists.

White Boy Rapping experts initially theorized that White Boys could not, in fact, rap. This theory was proven wrong in 2000 with the release of The Marshall Mathers LP and the advent of “Em Theory”. The truth of the matter is that “the ability to rap” originates from two key sources, talent for putting words together on your feet and songwriting skills, and simple swagger. There are lot of black people who have the latter but lack the former. Anyone who went into a fairly well mixed public school could tell you that every black guy thinks he’s got xtra siiick rhymin’ skillzz, and a very large percentage of them actually don’t. Soulja Boy is like, the source from which half of these guys were apparently cloned. But they can, at least, get by on having the kind of swagger that most White Boys lack. K-Fed has some swagger (that he can’t back up) but lacks any kind of talent. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

His rhymes are nothing to write home about (if you do indeed write home to your parents when you hear some phat rhymes) and the beats are completely forgettable. K-Fed has a bewildering habit of changing his voice, switching between a smooth blackcent on some tracks and a rough, whispery, sort of growl on others, as if he’s David Caruso trying his hand at hip hop. Whoever the fuck produced this album decided that every line should be followed by a whispered voice repeating the last word, which is one of the cheesiest hip-hop effects ever devised, ranking along side auto-tuner, steel drums, and Ja Rule. Even the hooks are pretty boring. With the amount of “pop rap” stuff that’s been released in this last decade, how hard is it to write a damn memorable hook? Couldn’t you hire T.I. for like, $50 a line or something?

As one would expect, the lyrics are truly where the hilarity lies. K-Fed is mainly concerned with a few key things: how much money he (apparently) has, how much he likes to party, how much cooler and tougher he is than you, how he hates everyone and everything for vague reasons, and how he smokes massive, incredible, mindblowing amounts of weed. He revisits all of these themes constantly, on nearly every track, to the point where few of them are even thematically different at all. Really, you could think of it as a concept album. K-Fed probably conceived of this as being the Dark Side of the Moon of this generation, probably whilst forcibly inserting a bong into his anus because he already has seventeen spliffs in his mouth.

The album begins with an insanely inexplicable “intro”: a chorus of children say “Grandpa, can you tell me a story about when you were young” and a voice that sounds like DJ Bobo telling vampires to get alive answers with a rich laugh and “Gather ’round, children”. Oh boy. Then comes the montage of actors portraying newscasters doubting the legitimacy of K-Fed’s marriage to Britney Spears, his talent as a rapper, and his parenting skills. Oh boy. Then a door smashes open, footsteps, wood creaking and breaking, a table flipped over, a glass breaks, a bird squawks and swords unsheath. The next track begins with the line “I’m a pirate on the sea, call me Captain Hook/Everything belong to me, every cranny and nook”. Ooh boy.

With the intro, he establishes the point of the album: answering his critics, leaving a legacy for his grandchildren (sorry K-Fed’s grandchildren), and…being a pirate. Okay. That next track is called “World is Mine” but is not a Nas rip-off Scarface homage, but is (I shit you not) built around K-Fed positioning himself as some kind of Pirate of the Carribbean. I went into Playing With Fire expecting absolute mediocrity. What I was not expecting was just how WTF this would be. It’s like K-Fed ran out of synonyms for “cash”, “weed” and “fuck you” and just filled it with whatever insane shit he could think of, believing that no one would pay close enough attention to notice. He obviously did not count on geeks with too much time on their hands.

There are the times when he throws around confusingly bizarre slang. From “Snap”: “I’m drinkin’ French Connection, blowin’ on Broccoli/You got lil’ dough, I got cake with no icing/K-Federline, I snap like Mike Tyson” See, I don’t know what that means, K-Fed. At other points, individual lines make sense, but are combined incoherently. Like on “America’s Most Hated”:

They watch me
So I duck and roll
Middle fingers still up sayin’ fuck the globe
And my dawgs still down
We don’t trust them hoes
I live life like a King
I was extra stoned
Kevin Federline -
I come tight with every rhyme
I built a kingdom down the street from pepperdine
This marijuana got me heavily sedated
I’m Kevin Federline

America’s most hated (what!)

Yes, what? It’s like he gets bored every five words and starts talking about something else. Except what he talks about is inevitably something he just talked about ten lines ago but forgot, because oh my god he’s so fucking high. During “Crazy” – between the horribly-sung Britney Spears guest spot choruses – we can see another example of such WTF lyrics:

When the pen hits the pad
It’s in the left hand
Every single word is worth thirty grand
Or maybe more
Don’t think they understand
How much cake the pancake man had
So heavy like weight
Moving upstate
Care for my rhyme
Like the crime rate
I flick with your boy
The prince of the bay
Sit back, day to day
Got two back packs
Resno on one
LA in other
Whilst I’m holding my sons
As I march through the valley of the shadow of death
Daughter on my chest
Wife on my left
Let’s go

That’s clearly some of the most sincere urban storytelling you’ll hate to admit you like. That actually reminds me of another strange tendency K-Fed has: referring to himself as “the pancake man” or some variation there of. I have no idea why he’s “the pancake man”, and I don’t recall any moment on the album where he explains it. He just starts calling himself that and talking about pancakes all the fucking time. He mentions pancakes like, five times. Closer “Kept On Talkin’” features a chorus of “Pancake, pancake, pancake, I’m that bad!” No, really. I suppose the pancake thing explains this rhyme from “Dance With a Pimp”, sort of:

Hair was out of style, I cut ten inches
Then I put 30 G’s in my dentures
Now that’s pimpin’
Never simpin’
I know your girl wanna come dance with a Bisquick

This is not the lamest reference that K-Fed makes on Playing With Fire. On the title track, he says “I’m like Val Kilmer, I’m bringin’ this heat”. I didn’t even know that Val Kilmer was in Heat. I had to Google that shit. I haven’t seen Heat, so maybe someone could tell me what the point of referencing Val Kilmer would be, instead of say, frequent gangster rap icons Robert De Niro or Al Pacino? Is K-Fed a Val Kilmer fan? Are there some unreleased tracks where he sings about Top Gun and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? Just a second or two later, he ends a line by sing-songing “Because of the wonderful things he does!” So gangsta.

There are some seriously LOL-inducing moments here. On “America’s Most Hated”, Federline warns “Little boys we can get it on/Watch your back”. To quote someone far more talented than Kevin Federline:

Someone needs to take that man’s children from him, now. Besides such hilarious parts, most of Playing With Fire is just what you’d expect, tired, boring platitudes about K-Fed’s money and status. “I’ve got 50 mil I can do whatever I want.” Such boasting is made hilarious by the fact that K-Fed is such a joke. He acts as if he should command respect, but it’s not like he even earned any of that money. He just lucked into a disastrous relationship with a wayward pop star. In the long run, K-Fed is going to be about as culturally relevant and important as Joe the Plumber. And no one wants to listen to an album by Joe the Plumber.

This is perhaps the reason why Playing With Fire is really so terrible. The American people have demonstrated an incredible lack of taste this decade, but even we aren’t dumb enough to think that an album of music by Kevin Federline deserves our time or money. The man got famous just by marrying and impregnating someone else who was famous. Then he decided to release an album, but his album literally has no point, except perhaps as a joke, and a joke that – despite the fun I’ve had with it here – is really not worth actually sitting and listening to. The music is nothing, the rapping is nothing, and Federline has no story to tell. Hopefully, when he has grandchildren he’ll be old enough to have realized that his life was a waste and he has nothing of note to tell them. Most people could, in some way, justify their existence, but Kevin Federline has failed at this simple task. He has nothing interesting to say and doesn’t do anything to benefit anyone else and in the end can’t even do anything to benefit himself. He has essentially proven that he is a pointless human being.

Of course, I sound pretty harsh. According to all the entertainment news sources, K-Fed has stepped up as a dad since Britney went super-cuckoo and I think he’s getting married again or something. Good for him. Those are some good excuses to exist. Let’s just hope he never picks up a microphone again.

Because this is some terrible shit.

I’ll leave you with one of the more hilarious lines from Playing With Fire:

“Cab looked better than a couple pair of Grammy’s”

Now how would you ever know what those look like, Kevin?

Next Round: Metallica – St. Anger

Have you heard the worst album of all time? Tell us! We’re always looking for recommendations. If you think you know something just crappy enough to be a contender, leave a comment about it.