01 Jul Gorilla Zoe – King Kong | Album Review

When analyzing the artistic progression of Atlanta MC and Bad Boy South rep Gorilla Zoe, a quick recap of his album covers is very telling. On 2007’s Welcome to the Zoo, the Miles Davis-inspired cover featured a very simple, black-and-white extreme close-up of Zoe’s menacing ice-grill. It seemed totally natural for Zoe; like a picture he might have taken even if it weren’t for an album. Similarly, the music on Zoo, while far from groundbreaking, seemed very organic, with Zoe flowing about things like how nice his car is, life in the trap, money, bitches – you know, the usual. The album’s lead single, “Hood Nigga,” is, to this day, the perfect Gorilla Zoe song: a bare-bones track that banged but still allowed Zoe to put his most valuable asset – his deep, gravelly voice – on full display. Zoe stayed in his lane and drove his debut straight to gold certification. His second album cover featured a flossy and very posed Zoe sitting at a desk with a glass of what is assumed to be cognac and smoking a cigar, with several stacks of money, an open briefcase and a money counter in front of him – all in an obviously computer-generated office environment. For an album titled Don’t Feed the Animals – which is usually a warning that, if ignored, might get you fucked up – this cover seemed kinda… tame. Maybe this was the “Bad Boy” beginning to emerge from the hardnosed Southerner. Beat-wise, the music didn’t stray too far from that on Zoo (hard, club-friendly, trunk-worthy) but the use of the autotune effect definitely took the grit and grime we’d become accustomed to out of Zoe’s timbre, making his already mediocre rhymes even harder to listen to. It’s almost like he put a shiny suit on his vocal chords. Obviously, we’re headed in the wrong direction here.