Review – Culture II
January 27, 2017: a normal Friday for most but, a monumental day for the rap group: Migos. On this day their most anticipated album “Culture” was released and was a huge success, topping both the Billboard 200 and Billboard Hip Hop and R&B charts for albums. In July of 2017 the album was platinum certified by the Recording Industry Association of America.
In addition to this, Culture was nominated for the best Rap Album of the year at the 60th Grammy Awards. 364 days later, the sequel to the highly acclaimed “Culture”, “Culture II” , was released with 11 more songs and 47 more minutes of listening time. With more songs, longer run time, and better producing, Culture II was anticipated to be a hit. 
This however, was not the case. Before the release of each album, three songs were released as singles. Culture released the singles, “Slippery,” “T-Shirt” and “Bad and Boujee” featuring Lil Uzi Vert which topped the Billboard charts for 36 weeks. This year’s singles were,“Supastars,” “Stir Fry” and “Motorsport,” which Featured Cardi B and Nicki Minaj. “Motorsport” is eighth in the Billboard Chart but peaked at sixth and Stir Fry is at 12th.
In the year between the release of Culture and Culture II, Migos and its members, Quavo, Offset and Takeoff have produced a number of popular features. 
Sonically their best was on Gucci Mane’s “I Get That Bag” which peaked at number 11 on the Billboard charts. In addition, both Quavo and Offset produced individual albums with other artists, Quavo with Travis Scott and Offset with 21 Savage and Metro Boomin. All members of the group also appeared on A$AP Ferg’s album “Still Striving” and Quality Control’s album “Control the Streets Vol.1. ”With appearances on other artists’ hugely successful albums and the creation of their own solo projects, it begs the question whether Migos can really sustain a three minute song by themselves. The two most successful songs on the album “Motorsport” and “Stir Fry” were two of the three singles released before the album came out, when “Stir Fry” came out after “Motorsport” the hype for Culture II intensified with two back to back singles doing well when the third single Supastars came out the hype died down but once the album itself came out the reviews were beyond negative. “Rolling Stone” gave the album a three out of five star rating, when last year it gave Culture a three and a half out of five stars. 
The group is phenomenal on features under three minutes but it seems that they hit a wall once the song time goes above three minutes. When the group is left on their own it seems that they need a feature to lift the song out of the dust, even on Culture’s most popular song “Bad and Boujee” Lil Uzi Vert’s featured verse added a new element to the group that had never been seen before. I agree with Rolling Stone’s assessment of the album at 3 stars, this was extremely disappointing due to the amount of projects produced by the group and members of the group.