Everybody knows Wendy. She’s been serving up her signature square beef patties in the fast food world since 1969. But in 2018, striving to serve good fast food just isn’t enough to hold the attention of the public anymore. So, in a bold and unexpected move, Wendy has decided to launch herself into the music industry with her debut mixtape “We Beefin?” released on March 23. No, this isn’t a joke. It’s no secret that the social media profiles of fast food restaurants have been blowing up recently due to the dramatic “beef” that they start with one another. But Wendy’s has taken it one step further by releasing a real, 10-minute mixtape intended to insult other fast food chains. The initial humor of this project is spot on, from the tongue-in-cheek song titles to the cover art parody of The Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 debut album “Ready to Die.” However, the mixtape very quickly wears out its welcome once its novelty wears off and ultimately presents nothing more than five generic trap songs with relatively weak writing and flow.
The intro cut on the project “Twitter Fingers” is a straightforward brag track that sees “Wendy” rapping about her status and influence on Twitter with lines like “Hashtag legend, can’t keep the fakes up off me” and “You Twitter beefin’ for some clout.” The two short verses on this two-minute cut are full of cheesy puns and call outs to other restaurants with some questionable flow choices on some of the rhyme scheme switches. The chorus is just as cringeworthy: “Who got the twang up in they sauce, yeah? Who got the thangs that hit so hard, yeah?” The production on this track is entirely forgettable at best, and just straight lazy at worst. The beat utilizes some simple stock piano samples and tinny hi-hats and snares. The bass drum hits seem to be inserted without much thought as to how they flow together which throws the timing of the whole track off. Some of the more accentuated lines in the verses and chorus use a painful, cheap autotuned effect that does nothing to enhance the flow or impact of the line. The track itself is essentially unfinished with no discernable ending or breakdown of the beat. The end of the track just suddenly cuts off and then jarringly cuts into the beginning of the next.
“Rest in Grease” is the shortest cut on the record, clocking in at just a minute and a half. Ironically, this track is the best on the project. The production here, while still simple and unoriginal, has the best sense of flow and a healthy amount of variety within its beat. It’s instrumentation utilizes a sweeping, heavily synthesized organ sample layered with the usual stock trap beat percussion progressions and some reverbed bass. The writing and flow here is also marginally better than on the rest of the tracks, even though some of the lines are a little too easy and low effort. For example, they decide to call out McDonald’s with the lines “Why yo’ ice cream machine always broke? Why yo’ drive thru always slow?” But some of these lines are so uninspired and uninteresting that they might as well just be actual lines from a Wendy’s commercial, ie. “You can take a fry and dip it in the sauce, it still be so tasty.”
Social media beef has become an integral and unavoidable part of internet culture. Fast food restaurants that have decided to capitalize on the possibilities for creative and humorous content creation on social media have become so overwhelmingly popular that many of them even have their own dedicated pages on Reddit, the front page of the internet ™. Wendy’s has taken this celebrity meme status to the next level with its own parodical mixtape and it’s probably just a matter of time before other chains follow suit. The concept itself and the pure shock value that comes from the release of “We Beefin?” has undoubtedly been one of the most entertaining internet happenings in quite some time. However, once you look past the sheer ridiculousness of the project and the humor it initially presents, you’re left with a sloppily made sandwich of sound with not as much meat as you were expecting.
