Release Date: September 28, 2010
Label: It's A Wonderful World Music Group
I remember reading an interview with Michael Phelps during the 2008 Olympics and they asked him what he listened to when he was waiting to race. He said he liked Southern hip-hop "mostly Lil' Wayne." As many of you may know, I look often to Michael Phelps for musical analysis and criticism. So, in a sense, this is how it was explained to me what "Southern hip-hop" now represented.
Gone were the days of Nappy Roots and Outkast. This isn't a knock on Lil' Wayne or anybody else, but the South used to represent something a little different. It was more arty and more hard work. Andre 3000 was flashy in that Buckhead fashion team kind of way, but Southern hip-hop came to typify blue collar rap. New York and Los Angeles were turning out stuff from the ghetto and talking about it. Those dudes from the South were a lot from the ghetto, too. But, there wasn't as much glamorizing thug life as wanting a good job. Positive-tip might've actually started down there, even though that's not where the credit goes. Now, the winner of 700 gold medals had reclassified the region.
Big Remo's new release starts to bring it back. Produced by 9TH Wonder (another North Carolina product), the album restores the drive that Little Brother was so apt to put out there. From go, Remo raps about surviving. About how he's been in the street and he's still ambitious. Not Tony Montana ambitious, like legitimate ambitious. That he's gonna make it up one way or another, but "new chicks tired of this thug male." And it's mostly stories. Southern hip-hop came up not too long after New York made the art apparent, and the originals told tales like Slick Rick. Mainstream rap has seemingly taken a turn from this-is-what-happened to this-is-what's-gonna-happen-bitch, but Remo keeps it old this way. His way of telling about the neighborhood is somewhere between Biggie and Scarface, which puts him in line with MCs like One Be Lo and reaching for those like Brother Ali. And 9TH uses his still considerable talent (a lot of listeners wrote him off after his track on The Black Album) to back the stories up. This ought to be expected from the Carolina history professor. There are a few fun songs on there, too. Remo calls "Woop Woop" a "barbecue song," but there's just some element missing.
And that's really the weakness of the album: it's incomplete in some way or another throughout. Every time a song really gets going, it seems to drop you just as you're about to get out of your seat. Remo has a strong voice to push good lyrics, but his cadence reminds you of the upstart MC you see walking down the street with his headphones on just spitting line after line, all force and no variation. You think he might be pretty good with the right producer and you hope he finds him. On the whole, though, it's the featured vocalists who save the album. Which may be a bad sign for Remo, but keep in mind: he's just coming around (maybe with his headphones in) and it was his idea to get back to the South.
We'll see if you can swim to the next one.
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