Ghais Guevara

Ghais Guevara is back… more or less. For a couple of years now, he has been calling himself Goyard Ibn Said, an alter ego at the center of this self-titled album. It’s the premise of a narrative, a different way of telling his story, which here takes the form of an album in two “acts”: the rise and the crisis caused by success.

After a self-ironic introduction, "The Old Guard Is Dead" explodes into a trap with operatic vocals, and quickly becomes a musical tale that mimics the subgenre and its clichés to highlight the hypocrisies of society and the industry. The political theme is still central but the form is almost too conventional, at least until "I Gazed Upon the Trap With Ambition" reinvents itself after an interlude: it is reborn as a noisy, nervous hip-hop track, a Travis Scott hallucination infused with an extra dose of aggression.
The more abstract beat of "Monta Ellis" (feat. Yoko McThuggin) and the distorted one in "Yamean" (feat. Faro) mark a shift in sound and content that leads to the post-apocalyptic, unsettling dance of "Bystander Effect" (feat. Elucid), the jungle beat over which he raps in "4L", and the chamber music that serves as a beat, drumless no less, in "The Apple That Scarcely Fell" (feat. McKinley Dixon).
A shift also in intensity and lyrical density, as confirmed by the painful "Branded" and the bitter "Critical Acclaim".
The closing track, "You Can Skip This Part", ironically titled, is actually the key to understanding the album, which takes a stand against the modern blaxploitation of the music industry by white people.

And I'm dancin' for these crackers while I call these niggas crackers
And I'm dappin' up the rappers that's subservient to crackers
So what happens to the fact that we be stuck in a contraption that's created by these crackers?

The form of "Goyard Ibn Said" alternates some moments of excessive adherence to clichés with moments that are significantly more creative and unorthodox. The message comes through with less incendiary raps than in his early works, while still retaining at least some of that power. "Goyard Ibn Said" is neither the most daring of Ghais Guevara’s projects nor a sellout move, but rather a middle ground that is appreciated for its curious two-part structure yet ultimately gets stuck halfway: more approachable yet still eccentric, without truly surprising.

07/03/2025