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Me Against the World 2 -> Trapavelli 2 -> Codeine Cowboy is the sequence of mixtapes where the 2 Chainz character comes into perspective and I realized I was actually a fan of the guy. I'd recommend looking for reviews of those works if you want to read more about the transition. Here's my TRU Realigion review, which came after those three and before his first big radio singles/debut album dropped. Funny how I came out of the last paragraph entirely wrong haha:
Just a little over a year ago, I'd have never expected to be in the Artist Formerly Known as Tity Boi's corner. I spent the early part of the 2000s listening to him appear on each of Ludacris' albums, supplying serviceable weed carrier verses at best. He never carried a song and never even threatened to, which was what made the dullness of his two albums with Dolla Boy as Playaz Circle so unsurprising. It was just a couple of guys who'd spent their entire lives living in the shadow of an extremely superior rapper playing at spotlight-worthiness. But then Tity Boi split off on his own, and spent a few months not sipping codeine. He dropped one mixtape, and then another, at some point he started sipping again and released another mixtape. And somewhere within that storyline, Tity Boi didn't just become a decent rapper, he became the most popular fucking rapper in Atlanta.
The intrigue of, ahem, 2 Chainz is pretty blatant. As I've outlined before, he's a very extreme caricature of what it takes to succeed in the trap field right now. His money is as dissolvable as water, his weed as loud as the eye of a storm and his disdain for even learning a woman's name before fucking them at Goldie levels. All of this is filtered through a delivery that stands in complete contrast to his implied attitude; 2 Chainz would like us to believe that grinding on the block comes fairly easy to him, that life is just a game he plays with all the casual interest of a Monopoly player who took hold of Boardwalk and Park Place within a half hour of the game starting. But that delivery is something else, so urgent and forceful, one part anger and one part serious contempt. It's an approach that pretty much demands attention from anyone in earshot, which then adds to the humorous, cartoonish nature of what he's actually talking about.
So, yea, I root for 2 Chainz. It doesn't hurt his cause at all that for three mixtapes in a row now he's culled some of the more enjoyable production his sort of rapper could procure. It's just fucking gloriously ignorant, mixed and mastered in the way Gucci Mane's prolific run in 2008 deserved to be. But what does hurt his cause, at least when it comes to guys like me, is that 2 Chainz isn't someone you can count on to be creative. Charismatic, sure. Handy with a chorus, maybe. But after three mixtapes in a row of what felt like listening to a rapper at the top of his game and now a horribly titled collection of more of the same, it's hard to say how much higher he can go. T.R.U. Realigion is his most bloated tape in a while - certainly his most star-laden - but it's not as highlight-able as Trap-A-Velli 2 was. There's no highs here so much as a long string of certified bangers that mosh around with each other creating a near homogenous mixture. Standouts are relegated entirely to listener taste, and if you aren't as infatuated with 2 Chainz' weirdness as I am it'd be easy to say T.R.U. Realigion is a difficult mixtape to finish when you aren't in the right mood.
I know I do a lot of prognosticating when it comes to mixtape rappers' careers, if only because it's an extremely fickle market that's so easy to flood and fade from. I'm going to avoid any sweeping declarations here because fans of 2 Chainz are no doubt going to be pleased with what's going on here. But, not unexpectedly, T.R.U. Realigion's definitely more of what we've already received from the guy and contains just as many bad and mediocre ideas as good ones ("Viagra" looks questionable on paper but trust me, it's a lot more jester-like than you could ever expect), so for anyone like me that grew up during the Tity Boi phase of this career, it's not hard to envision a regression to the mean just around the corner. Hell, the last seven tracks here all but guarantee it.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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