Seems crazy. Stepping into the shoes of Kerry Buchanan, the guy who taught me about hip hop and r‘n’b. Whose tastes most shaped my own. Whose music writing at its peak I will ever consider the greatest this country can produce. But it has to be done and, given that Kerry himself would acknowledge that his love affair with hip hop waned considerably over the last few years, it seems ironic that my first column will be dedicated to an artist I’m certain he would adore.
Maybe there’s no contradiction in it at all though. Kerry fell out with hip hop because its current flashy, consumerist values parted ways so violently with his near-Marxist ideology, and he felt its once-revolutionary spirit had been nearly entirely suffused in much of what he heard. Freddie Gibbs was signed to Interscope a few years back, a label with a rich hip hop history from its association with Death Row, to the rap blockbusters released by Dr Dre, Eminem and 50 Cent. But while those albums were undoubted artistic and commercial successes, much of what they spawned was garbage.
Gibbs raps about his experiences
being a minor player at the bottom
of the major label food chain, and how they tried to make him come with “that fast food pop flow” on Midwestgangsta
-boxframecadillacmuzik, the second incredible mixtape (this one’s an album in all but name) he’s released for free download this year. But beyond label hassles he spends a lot more time rapping about the grim reality of life on the streets of Gary, Indiana.
Where? Exactly. Gary is a city roughly the size of Dunedin, with the largest African-American population of any US town of over 100,000 residents. It also suffered massively with the collapse of the US steel industry in the ’60s, leaving a legacy of chronic unemployment. Into that vacuum stepped the drug trade and crime, and with them came Freddie Gibbs, a man born so poor he “slept up in the sock drawer”, and the best new rapper I’ve heard in years.
Why? Because before it became a mess of flashy signifiers, before every rapper became an Escobar-level kingpin, gangsta rap really did tell the story of the corner boys, and express the sense of danger, hopelessness and strange power that The Wire explored so eloquently these past few years. Gibbs knows that life too well, and when he raps about it you’re right there with him.
The opening track to its predecessor, a compilation entitled The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs was called GI Pride and over an oddly solemn sample from the Flashdance theme (What a Feeling),
he explained the situation.
“On the streets as a worker/ Was a
very fast learner/ School never taught me how to be a earner/ Before you motherfuckers bother me/ Just take a look at this economy/ ’Cause economically we at the bottom/ You playa hatin’ niggas tried to copy me/ My enemies they tried to body me/ But couldn't get to me
before I got ’em”.
It takes gangsta rap back to the boarded-up rowhouses and kill-or-be-killed, back to the documentarian aspect where survival is a prize and riches measured in thousands rather than millions. And it’s accompanied by production which rivals the Swishahouse beats of the mid-’00s (think Still Tippin’ or Sittin’ Sideways) for slo-o-o-ow bump and the influence of a cocktail of cheap drugs. Songs like County Bounce and Murda on My Mind have this deep dread to them, which drags in Mobb Deep’s chilling, callous approach to life, and mixes it with Outkast’s vision of psychedelic rap (as opposed to De La Soul’s), proving the titular allusion is no accident.
The accident is more that it made it out. The co-sign of DJ Skee, whose recent mixtapes have been alongside The Game and Jay-Z has helped. But most of all it was sheer quality, and the return of an approach you didn't know you missed so much until you hear it pounding again.
Kerry will love it.

Freddie Gibbs
Midwestgangstabox-
framecadillacmuzik
✱✱✱✱✱
A compelling voice, brilliant cadence, provocative lyrics, spellbinding production... what gangsta rap can
be but so rarely is.

TOO SHORT
Fabolous seemed like a joke when he arrived, but his Loso’s Way (✱✱✱✱) is actually one of the best hi-budget rap albums of the year... Despite being near-universally panned, Ghostface Killah’s r‘n’b album Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City (✱✱✱✱) is actually pretty great if you just listen to his wild words... The Roots are a very important act, but beatboxer Scratch’s solo album Loss 4 Wordz (✱) is a disaster despite some eyebrow-raising guests like Damon Albarn and Daniel Bedingfield... Same goes for Brother Ali’s well-intentioned but ultimately embarrassing Us (✱✱), which despite some occasionally entertaining production has hideously dated politics and sentiments.