Right here’s one thing that doesn’t look like it needs to be true: 2 Chainz is 5 years older than Lil Wayne. After all, within the mid-’90s Wayne willed his manner into the Money Cash Information places of work as a quasi-intern—after which onto radio and tv—earlier than he was sufficiently old to drive; in fact, the arc of two Chainz’s early profession extra intently resembles an EKG readout, to the purpose the place the primary music on 2007’s long-delayed Playaz Circle debut was a paean to missed launch dates referred to as “Pricey Mr. L.A. Reid.” And nonetheless, this little piece of biographical knowledge appears incorrect.
When 2 Chainz lastly grew to become a star, within the early 2010s, it was in a distinctly post-Tha Carter III world. Mixtapes had been nonetheless idiosyncratic and unmonetizable, however rap was in its transient flirtation with EDM, and the collapse of the CD gross sales economic system meant solely established megastars or exaggerated personas like his may reduce by way of the din. Even the best way the 2 shut pals have processed, of their solo work, their relationships to the previous are incongruent, with Wayne perpetually shadowboxing the greats of prior generations whereas 2 Chainz tinkers with status objects self-consciously positioned as trendy successors to The Blueprint.
Sadly, Welcome 2 Collegrove, the second album to pair these two MCs, is profoundly unstuck in time, dotted with the vestiges of two bygone eras however imbued with few of these eras’ charms. The liner notes recall a complete period together with SARS, Perez Hilton, and Iraq warfare protests by way of the Obama campaigns: DJ Toomp and STREETRUNNER, Bangladesh and Large Ok.R.I.T., Usher and Marsha Ambrosious. However the LP is frustratingly polished, defaulting to pristine mixes and beats which might be crisp, skinny, and wholly nameless. (This extends, sadly, to these from probably the most beloved contributors: Mannie Recent’s crowded, directionless “Large Diamonds” and Havoc’s pair of middling tracks, together with a stale 36 Chambers riff.) Mixed with verses that regularly prioritize competency over invention, these tracks make for an album that solely intermittently gestures towards both rapper’s signature types.
On Da Drought 3 or T.R.U. REALigion—even on the highlights from 2016’s superior Collegrove—there was an air of delirious impulsivity, the sense that Wayne or 2 Chainz would possibly, within the subsequent second, conjure a move or a picture that no human being had ever earlier than conceived of. There was a looseness of construction that allowed for hooks or excessive stakes however required neither. Welcome 2 Collegrove drags every artist into the center of the highway the place even some impressed premises (the mutation, on “Loopy Thick,” of Wayne’s notorious deposition video right into a strip membership instrumental, or his tight little seesaw cadence on “Lengthy Story Brief”) are sanded all the way down to their least memorable variations. That is true on the totally rote “Hundreds of thousands From Now” and the virtually narcotized “Transparency,” the schmaltzy “Can’t Consider You” and “Godzilla,” a music as “lukewarm” as 2 Chainz describes a specific lady’s mouth.
