Dave East 'Fortune Favors the Bold' Doesn't Live Up To Its Lofty Name

The title of Dave East’s new album, Fortune Favors the Bold, doesn’t come from knowledge he picked up on the streets during his New York City childhood. It didn’t come from East Harlem, where his mother lived, nor the notorious Queensbridge housing projects where he spent some of his teenage years living with his aunt. He didn’t adopt this advice while hooping with Ty Lawson and Greivis Vasquez in AAU. Close friend Kevin Durant never uttered the phrase either. He didn’t learn it from Nas, who quickly inked him to his Mass Appeal Records when he heard his music. No, the title of East’s new album–which features his most obvious appeals for chart success and streaming numbers to date–sprouted from an unlikely inspiration.

“You’ve got to be bold. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Don’t let your environment box you in,” East proclaimed in a statement that accompanied the album. “Don’t wait on anybody to hand shit to you. I was in the projects with nothing. My daughters will never even smell the projects or know anything about the life I lived. Tomorrow isn’t promised. In the meantime, I’m going to put out some shit that will be here forever.” It’s a beautiful concept, and one that East immediately undermines a few lines later. “I Googled John Wick’s tattoo,” he adds. “I thought about what Fortune Favors The Bold meant to me, and it totally fit the album.”

There’s just enough moments on the album that redeem East: sounding like the hungry MC who once wanted to take over East Coast rap. Unfortunately, many of these songs are overshadowed by tracks where East takes a backseat to radio ready collaborators, basically Googling “radio rap hit” in the same way he did “John Wick.” It’s not that the shots at streaming superiority are obvious, it’s that they don’t work.

“Sex So Good” with Coi Leray improbably makes sex sound, somehow, remarkably unpleasant, while the back-to-back, one-two gut-punch of “HUSTLERS” with Tyga and “WDGAF” with G-Eazy are as milquetoast as you’d expect from these artists. They’re both bad and remarkably unimpressive. But East coasts on as if the big names of his collaborators have the ability to push these songs to the top of Spotify’s rap playlists. On “WDGAF,” Mike Will Made-It phones it in, and East sounds uncomfortable trying to catch a beat that clearly doesn’t fit his preferred flow pattern. When the chorus of “They can’t shut me up” comes in, it’s a hard agree; though not in the way this duo expected. G-Eazy’s embarrassing verse is enough to make East sound like a generational rapper, but even associating with a hack like Eazy makes East look severely out of touch. “If I want a bad one, get a bad bitch pronto/ If she actin’ up, she not the only bitch that I know,” Eazy raps. It’d be offensive if it wasn’t so unoriginal.

The hints of greatness makes Fortune Favors the Bold quite a frustrating and uneven listen, especially because East regularly showed his skills on earlier projects — when he was hungrier, less successful, and less able to recruit top-tier stars. The beat selection is often quite strong, like on “Weirdos,” which features Jadakiss and arrives immediately after “WDGAF,” making the The Lox legend sound like Biggie in comparison. It’s striking to hear East on this song versus the one prior, as the menace in his voice is turned up a notch–as if he would be embarrassed to rap the way he did with G-Eazy alongside a legend like Jadakiss.

Perhaps, though, this is just the breaks of a major label contract. An artist like East—who associates so intensely with the streets he grew up on—isn’t interested in these studio-manufactured choruses and formulaic pop raps. Whether or not Def Jam insisted on these songs is besides the point; a lot of East’s personality is tied up in his integrity as an MC. Take a look at “Letter 2 Kobi,” the album finale and a dedication to his youngest daughter. It’s his most impassioned performance, and he raps his ass off. An entire album of this would be fantastic. The streams would probably be lower, but at a certain point East has to ask himself if 1.5 million streams is worth it if it comes alongside working with G-Eazy. Dave East proves throughout his new album that bravery and boldness have made his career what it is; it’s just a shame he abandons it more often than he lives up to the distinction.