M.a.r ‘UNDERQUALIFIED’ album & movie review

M.a.r just dropped an album & animated movie of the same name, UNDERQUALIFIED. Here’s a review:

Don’t deny M.a.r a job. Seriously, he might pull a gun on you… seriously.

M.a.r is as fed up with the employment struggle as you can possibly be. In UNDERQUALIFIED, the short film and on the accompanying soundtrack, he tackles this topic artistically.

It’s no secret that in today’s job market, many are working in fields nearly 100% different than what they went to school for. Some of that can be placed on the market, demand or times changing. For some individuals though, being under qualified is their reality.

Like the co-main character (the hiring boss) implies the short film: you can’t have 25 years of experience if the jobs requires 30. So, what do you do with your time? You make an album about it, of course!

On “INADEQUATE“, M.a.r powerfully speaks “I had it with being inadequate/Believe me, I’d rather quit/Got feelings I can’t admit, demons I with battle with“. “HOLD ON” has similar production but the message is 180°. Meanwhile, the intro title track addresses the issue of under qualification straight on.

UNDERQUALIFIED seems bottom heavy. You’ll notice the songs become progressively more polished and M.a.r even becomes more clear-minded and vocally as the album moves forward.

“SINK OR SWIM” sees M.a.r at his breaking point but everything past the mid-point, “Fed Up (Interlude)“, sounds like our main character now has a job. This is evidenced by the very next track being titled “QUIT“. It all ends, when the last track “FIRED” sees our main character losing his now coveted job because he was late, of all things. This song also contains the most humorous 3 consecutive bars on the entire UNDERQULAIFIED: “For all I know, you’re probably a crack addict/I said you know what, you can drug test me/Well, maybe not today but next week“.

Sonically, this album can be off-putting, from the mixes to the cadences to.. pretty much everything. It’s genre-bending in a non-innovative way. At it’s core, however, is messaging we’ve barely ever seen in Hip-Hop and a societal pain we’ve barely ever touched in a real way. Cheers to trauma.