On his fifth solo album, Big Sean gets personal, leans on a slate of high-profile guests to provide most of the entertainment, and struggles to deliver anything that isn’t fundamentally embarrassing.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Big Sean was like a streetwear Tumblr come to life, able to rap like Gucci Mane’s kid brother in one song, only to shift gears and drop a pretty serviceable Consequence impression in the next. The Detroit rapper’s manic energy and corny punchlines recalled Quagmire from Family Guy, a comparison that Sean himself stoked on his 2011 track “I Do It,” when he spent a few lines rhyming things with “giggity-giggity” and then rapped, “I’m Quagmire.” His “Marvin & Chardonnay” fit like a glove within the dizzying heights of Rustie’s transcendent 2012 Essential Mix, while the Nicki Minaj collaboration “Dance (A$$)” yielded both a pitch-perfect homage to the ghettotech of his hometown as well as perhaps the decade’s finest song about butts. Before too long, he’d carved out a niche for himself as a squeaky-voiced goofball, a fast-rapping Fabolous soundalike who was a welcome addition to any posse cut, able to parachute into songs provide some high-energy levity, and tastefully bow out before you had a chance to think too hard about what the hell an ass-state is.
The problem, though, is what happens when you’re stuck with a whole album’s worth of Big Sean. He doesn’t make bad records per se—this is a guy who releases music under the imprimatur of Kanye West, so there’s a certain level of grim competence to each of his full-lengths—it’s just that every time Big Sean attempts to reveal a deeper side of himself, he can’t help but come across as a woefully unpleasant person.
On Detroit 2, the rapper’s fifth solo album and the ostensible sequel to his 2012 mixtape, Big Sean positions himself as an enlightened despot. He rules over a kingdom in which wisdom is gained by woo-woo self-help books, relationships are transactional (“I can’t waste the sex on you and give you everything you can’t give me back”), and cancel culture is an existential threat to your brand (“It only takes one time to fuck up your whole Wikipedia.”) Between that stuff, the multiple judgments he renders on people’s “vibes,” and the ayahuasca reference on “FEED,” it seems like Big Sean has spent the past few years internalizing the hyper-capitalism of the early-’70s New Age movement. Sure, at least it’s an ethos, but the places it takes Big Sean to feel incongruous with our current moment.
Take “Lucky Me,” the album’s second track. Over a shaggy soul beat from Hit-Boy and DJ Dahi, Sean reflects on the fact that he has dated numerous famous women, building up to the line, “It’s a living nightmare when your dream girl has to get canceled.” It’s a sentiment that feels vapid on its face, and becomes borderline sociopathic when you recall that earlier this summer, Big Sean’s ex-girlfriend, the actress Naya Rivera, died in a boating accident while saving her son’s life. Even if the line is meant to be about another woman, Big Sean’s insistence that someone’s personal struggles might specifically be a problem for him is, well, jarring. Things take a turn for the even more bizarre just moments later in “Lucky Me,” when Sean starts rapping about how he was diagnosed with a heart condition at 19, only for a naturopath to cure it with magnesium. “That’s how I know that Western medicine weak,” he concludes, the rare hint of bass in his voice. Which, fine, but also, we are currently experiencing the biggest public health crisis in a hundred years. He doesn’t have a moral duty or anything to not rap stuff like this—or, for that matter, “No sir, I don’t even do flu shots” from the otherwise pretty-great “Harder Than My Demons”—but it does make listening to Big Sean during a pandemic feel more pointless than it usually does.
Unfortunately, on many of the songs where Big Sean leaves his personal feelings about Western medicine to the side, he falls into the trap of assuming the style of a particular trend or artist but never quite selling the pose. Instead, he remains almost entirely anonymous. He sounds kinda like Young Thug on the song that Young Thug is on, kinda like Travis Scott on the song that Travis Scott is on, kinda like Wale on the song that Wale is on, and kinda like Lil Wayne on the song that Lil Wayne is on. And whenever he’s not employing a double-time flow, he gives the listener enough time to consider the absolute vapidity of lyrics like, “Laser focus, AOL, been had AIM,” or, “Full circle like exactly what the fuck karma is,” or, “My third eye and fourth eye open… damn.”
There are moments on Detroit 2 that feel special, but Big Sean himself rarely has anything to do with them. Dave Chappelle, Erykah Badu, and Stevie Wonder each pop up on interludes to tell delightful little stories that don’t necessarily involve Big Sean himself. (Chappelle’s, for instance, is about smoking weed with Danny Brown and then meeting Big Sean’s dad.) Eight of the record’s beats were handled by Hit-Boy, who transposes his stadium-sized sensibilities onto even the most sedate instrumentals in ways that are never not thrilling. On “The Baddest,” No I.D. takes a crack at flipping the same Godzilla-theme sample from Pharoahe Monch’s “Simon Says,” ends up recreating the track he’s paying homage to but with skittering trap drums, and it sounds so good that not even Big Sean can fuck it up. Lil Wayne absolutely tears into the loop of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” that undergirds “Don Life,” blowing his host out of the water and momentarily sketching out an alternate universe where the best beats on the album found their way into Wayne’s hands.
By far the best and most ambitious track on the album is “Friday Night Cypher,” which stitches together the past, present, and future of Detroit’s hip-hop scene. Over the course of nine and a half minutes, Sean invites a cast ranging from Tee Grizzley to Payroll Giovanni to Kash Doll to Boldy James to Eminem himself to showcase what makes them great, with ambient cheering and a contiguous, constantly shifting beat helping recreate the hazy vibe of a late-evening cut-up session in the studio. Sean’s tucked into the middle of the track and is absolutely in his element, touching on the Based God’s Curse(s), Meek Mill’s “Tony Story” story-raps, and browsing Zillow for kicks and giggles. It’s fun, effortless nonsense—in other words, the Platonic ideal of a Big Sean verse. And the best part? When his verse is over, Big Sean simply fades into the background, having made his mark and, for once on Detroit 2, not overstaying his welcome.
0 comments:
Post a Comment