The Heresy ( Mega Sean) – “HipHop 101” relentlessly drives home his messages

A Toronto born/Mississauga raised artist, Mega Sean is a self-taught song writer, musician and performer who has been a hardworking and successful independent artist since 2003. Mega Sean has also been one of the first artists in the GTA to turn his craft into a business and has thrived off of t-shirt merchandise and overall brand strategies and sales. He has featured artists like Busy Signal, Chris Martin, Master P and Lil Romeo on his mixtapes, and has performed with Snow, Wayne Wonder, Cutty Ranks and Punjabi MC, as well as opening for Kardinal, Socrates, Rihanna, Blake McGrath and many others.

Currently Mega Sean’s talents are flying high on the album “HipHop 101” with The Heresy, hosted by Jadakiss. Overall this is a very strong album with many standout tracks, purposeful, highly complex and thoughtful lyrics, which takes back to the time of classic hip-hop.

The beats are provided by top level production, and they are banging. Track after track, you keep thinking Mega Sean’s can’t possibly continue delivering such consistent bars, but he keeps proving you wrong.

The key to Mega Sean’s lyrical consistency is that’s what he feeds on, as well as a deep love of the culture, few others still have in today’s scene.  Right from the funky opener “Internet Frat Boys” to the pounding “West End” and the racy “You Get Nothing”, the lessons are endless from Mega Sean. An emcee doesn’t last as long as this guy does without dropping some thoughts worth learning from.

A lot of what he’s saying isn’t difficult to understand either. Simplicity is a deceptively hard thing to achieve. Artists like Mega Sean, who get right to the point in this fashion and actually say something are exceedingly rare to find.

But he kind of just gives you the truth, and it comes out directly on the hard hitting rhymes of “Real Recognize Real” and “Street Life”. However, he has plenty of eye-opening statements that you should be receiving, and which you can pick up on “Let’s Build”, “Hip Hop 101” and “Pay Us”.

Sonically, the album has a slew of sounds that highlight the verses. It can go from the slower, soulful “Show Stoppa” to the reggae-like “Wasteman” and the mid-tempo slam of “Reload”. This is an artist with multiple flavors in his arsenal. Mega Sean probably takes hip-hop more seriously than any other rapper, as he directs much of his focus to reminding listeners about the forgotten roots of the genre.

Mega Sean is a master at timing the change in his topics and flow with the drops in the beat. He goes from the chugging flow of “On the Good Foot”, to the Latino jam of “La Policia” and the piano-driven crunch of “Meadowvale”, before closing the album with the crash and bang of “Stand Down”.

Ultimately, Mega Sean just lets loose across the board on this album, relentlessly driving home his messages, and valiantly shedding some light on what classic hip-hop from the golden age is about. That aside he does a fantastic job of combining his flow with his brilliant brand of rhyme.

OFFICIAL LINKS: BANDCAMP – YOUTUBE – MUSIC STREAMS