The saying goes, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." Lloyd Banks' new release, Rotten Apple, falls very far from the tree of Dr. Dre.

Dre started what seemed like a great new hip-hop family when he took Eminem under his wing. Eminem, in turn, took 50 Cent under his wing. 50 Cent started the G-Unit, which spawned a new Wu-Tang Clan-like flooding of the hip-hop market when all the members decided to release solo albums.

This tree has branched out too far, and Rotten Apple is a sure sign of that. The apple has fallen miles from where it started with Dre's N.W.A. This is the danger of nepotism in the music industry. Give your friends a record deal, and their friends, and their friend's friends, and all of a sudden, you have people in a recording studio who shouldn't even be allowed near karaoke night.

Banks might resist getting booed off the karaoke stage if he's lucky. Yes, his lead single from the album, "Hands Up," is catchy, but it's uninspired. Eminem's beats on the track consist of a repetitive pulsing synthesizer that sounds like a bug zapper and a few random string chords thrown in every four bars.

Banks' rhymes are no better. He throws together disconnected, nonsensical lines about guns, money and drugs in "Playboy 2." The album as a whole is purely self-serving.

It comes off like a boring blog in rap form over beats that repeat themselves over and over and over again.

Not only is Banks uninspired, but he's contradictory. Just after "Playboy 2," where he praises his own personal riches, he waxes philosophical on "Make a Move," saying "Use your money; don't let your money use you."

You'd think that after telling us you grew up on your own in "Survivor," you'd have some insight for us. But every mention of money on the album is in reference to how much Banks can spend.

In hip-hop (or any other genre of music, for that matter), morality has nothing to do with the quality of the music. But like any speech in Communication Arts and Sciences 100 (Effective Speech), credibility does. Banks has zero credibility on Rotten Apple, and his lack of original rhymes or semblance of production value does nothing to help that.

There's very little to compliment here, if anything at all. Musiq lends his soul power to "Addicted," but his presence is sort of like putting a fresh coat of paint on a Ford Pinto.

This may not be the worst album of the year, since designating it as such would involve listening to millions of albums. But there's not much Banks or his sensei 50 Cent could have done to make Rotten Apple worse.

As Mike Myers' public access hero Wayne Campbell would say, "It's not just a clever name."

Rotten Apple is truly rotten. Grade: F