Sa-Ra – The Hollywood Recordings

Very few groups have the hype machine working for them quite like Sa-Ra does. Everywhere I’ve turned in the past six months someone has been trying to sell me on Sa-Ra being the next big thing in Hip-Hop. Of course, all of those people doing the selling work with them in some way. Now that The Hollywood Recordings is out we can all finally judge for ourselves. Sadly, much like the majority of things that are over-hyped, Sa-Ra isn’t much to write home about. The Hollywood Recordings sounds like an album made up of people who think they’re really cool and desperately want us to feel the same way about them. Unlike a George Clinton album, where the artist comes across as cool because they are, not because they feel they are, Sa-Ra’s album lacks authenticity. At times they try to channel George Clinton, and at other times (a lot of times) they make attempts to sound like Pharrell, but at no point in time do they attempt to create a sound of their own. In the end, The Hollywood Recordings is another example of someone trying to manufacture cool when we all know in reality cool is simply a state of being and it can’t be faked.