There was an interesting concept behind The Album About Nothing, but the execution didn’t match up. When it takes fifty minutes for the album to get interesting, something hasn’t been done right. Having the last three songs on the album stand out like this isn’t a good thing though. The collaboration with Stokley Williams on The Bloom (AG3) is the stand out track here, with the mixture of the brass instruments and funk-driven atmosphere of the song working with Stokley’s soulful voice to make something different from the less interesting style of the rest of the album. The Album About Nothing redeems itself somewhat for the last three tracks, which all feature singers instead of fellow rappers, and are all easy to listen to in comparison to what came before. It reaches the point where you forget there was any Seinfeld referencing at all, and it just feels like any other album. Put together with the album’s sixty minute run time, it all gets to be a bit too much by the middle of the album, and it starts feeling like a chore to listen to. Most of the songs are over four minutes, and feel like they go on for a few minutes too long. None of the backing tracks bear any resemblance to the music used on the show, and instead the album features repeated usage of dated hip-hop productions that mostly tend to blend into each other, which is helped by Wale’s rapping. It’s an interesting concept for a hip-hop album, but in practice the samples feel out of place. The songs are all titled similarly to episodes of Seinfeld, and the album title is a direct reference to Seinfeld’s claims of being the “Show About Nothing”. Similarly to The Mixtape About Nothing, this album features extensive Seinfeld references, with nine of the fourteen songs featuring samples of Seinfeld’s stand-up, quotes from Seinfeld in the studio during the recording or direct audio from episodes of the show.
The Album About Nothing is an interesting case, as it featured direct input from Jerry Seinfeld himself as it was being created. Unfortunately it’s not exactly a successful venture. In a sense, The Album About Nothing is a direct follow-up to the mixtape. The gimmick behind the release was its heavy references to Seinfeld, with the largest being a guest appearance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the actress that played Elaine. Back in 2008, Wale released The Mixtape About Nothing.
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