Yasin is as bitter as Ulf Lundell

Who is more careless, writers, critics or rappers? After listening to Yasin’s new album, “Your Turn in Blue,” I am beginning to suspect that anxiety is spreading. The rules are stricter now in politics, criticism and hip-hop. Yasin demands “correct grammar, spelling, commas and full stops” from lesser rappers before declaring himself Swedish hip-hop’s matador. Ironically, his new album is among his loosest.

Three years have passed since Yasin’s previous record. During that time, he released around 20 singles and an EP of previously unreleased material. Even so, the new album has been described in the media as a comeback. Aftonbladet’s Lidija Praizovic praises Yasin’s poetic precision and sees a connection with the late poet Yahya Hassan. DN music editor Mina Asp Romefors says his bluntness proves he is a brilliant lyricist. Editorial writer Jonna Sima has urged Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer to listen to him in order to understand how Sweden became marked by segregation and gang warfare.

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correct grammar, spelling, commas and full stops

Perhaps all of them have been distracted by the album’s ambition. Its most discussed track, “1991,” begins with Somalia’s civil war and ends with a young Yasin being drawn into gang crime. The video offers a promising visual frame, with Yasin delivering the lyrics alone in a theater. But the song does not meet the expectations it creates.

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To understand this story / I have to take you back in time

“1991” opens with one of hip-hop’s most worn-out formulas: “To understand this story / I have to take you back in time.” It then moves into a nostalgic and predictable elegy for Sweden’s decline. The delivery is stiff, and the lyrics repeatedly force words into lines where they do not fit. The most revealing verse describes Yasin’s mother watching her first two husbands die and then losing one of her children. It ends with a line intended to sound brutal but which instead comes across as heartless: “now she is standing in line at social services, thinking, ‘Fuck.’”

The rest of the album resembles hip-hop’s version of Ulf Lundell’s “Vardagar,” written by a parent of young children in Berlin. Complaints about the present alternate with diary entries about setting goals, finding more sources of income and cutting expenses. They sit alongside familiar observations about depleted social energy, self-help claims about staring at the horizon curing depression, and school-level aphorisms. The review’s verdict is that the album’s serious ambitions cannot conceal its slackness.

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now she is standing in line at social services, thinking, ‘Fuck.’