*Welcome to Mixdown, an ongoing series where Pitchfork staffers and contributors talk about mixtapes, mixes, and other beat-based ephemera that may not be covered in our reviews section but are worth discussing. *Today, Corban Goble, Meaghan Garvey, and Wesley Case talk about Gunplay, Rome Fortune, and Childish Gambino.**-=-=-=-

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Gunplay: Gunplay__

Corban Goble: Well, here’s a new mixtape from Gunplay, featuring guest spots from Rick Ross, N.O.R.E., Birdman and others. It’s mostly freestyles over popular productions from the last couple of years, and it is OK I guess. What did you guys think of this? Also give me an idea of when you think this album is actually going to hit the shelf—will traditional shelving still be a thing, or will we have moved on to iCloud-based-laser-guided hover-shelves?

Meaghan Garvey: Yeah, I’d bet Living Legend will be out sometime shortly after Detox, and shame on Rick Ross for that—you can make Stalley pop off, but not Gunplay?! This whole thing is depressing, honestly: here we have one of the best bar-for-bar rappers alive doing half-assed karaoke over viral hits from teenagers half his age. For all the “album coming soon!” drops, Gunplay sounds resigned to his fate; that spark, the urgency, that animated his incredible run of mixtapes from 2011 to early 2013 is totally gone. And while I’d still rather hear an hour of C-grade Gunplay verses than most other rappers at their best, I miss that sense of DISRUPTION I used to get from his music—like, I could actually multi-task while listening to this, instead of just sitting there slack-jawed hoping my neighbors don’t complain (which they totally did when “Jump Out” first dropped). Even rapping over “Move That Dope,” a beat he should tear the fuck up, he shows his hand—he sounds practically coy compared to Casino’s original verse. But hey, I guess he’s got his escort service and his bomb shelter to keep him busy. Woof. Wesley, did this depress you as much as it did me?

Wesley Case: It’s hard to hear a lyrical beast like Gunplay say he doesn’t care when his album drops and then a few bars later rap, “MVP on the bench, still scoring.” It’s like we all know he deserves better. As a fan, I’m not even looking for Don Logan’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy—I imagine I’d be satisfied with a Gunplay mixtape that didn’t play like a YouTube playlist of freestyle loosies. Label politics aside, Gunplay, typically a loose cannon, sounds a bit subdued here (his sleepy take on “She Twerkin”, for example, fails to move the needle). As with any Gunplay tape, there’s excellent rapping here, but it doesn’t jump out of the speakers like “Bible on the Dash” or this monster. “Numbers on the Board”, in particular, gives the always alliterative-minded Gunplay the empty space he needs to shine, whether it’s “Can’t bargain with a Carbon-15/ Parched and fatigued in my stars fatigues” or “From under the porch light to picking the Porsche type.”

CG: I’m glad you bring up the idea of “empty space”, because those are the sorts of opening that Gunplay typically jumps through to make his songs pop. There’s not a ton of that here and some of that is structural, you know, having to throw in “Hot Nigga” and stuff like that and then Gunplay isn’t really bodying it at all. Two words you probably don’t want to see next to each other are “subdued” and “Gunplay,” but that’s what we have here, on Gunplay’s presumably-lazily-titled Gunplay.





Rome Fortune: Small VVorld