![]() ![]() When we talk about the difficulties facing veteran rappers, we’re usually talking about marketing and broader narratives: How do you stay vital in a genre that places such a premium on the surprising, the foreign, the young? Big Bad … makes what should be the obvious counterargument - that years of experience give an artist the rote skills and sense of judgment necessary to make tight formal exercises into succinct and irresistible finished products. Despite the title and the early focus on fatherhood, the back end centers Offset’s late grandmother in a moving way. The collaborations are similarly scattershot: The songs with Gucci and Gunna are clean and punishing, while he and Cardi’s “Clout” is weighed down by its cumbersome subject matter. ![]() ![]() He’s intermittently successful, especially in the album’s first and last thirds. ![]() It contains no obvious hits - most of what any member of Migos does could be slotted somewhere into a mix show, but Offset is swinging to make contact, deploying his pop gifts mostly in the service of crafting the sort of linear, world-building solo debut that was de rigueur for the long middle period of hip-hop’s history. It has maybe the only song to pivot cleanly from a Big Rube monologue into a rapper who sounds ashamed that he’s fallen short of Rube’s advice. (All this on the heels of Quavo’s sloppy, deeply mediocre solo effort, which was dead on arrival last fall.) Father of 4 more or less sounds like a Migos album - it’s a little smaller, quieter, more morose - but is written far differently, with the autobiography and personal regret acting as the spine rather than as a set piece tucked neatly at the end. Offset was once a distant second in the Migos arms race: Quavo had been earmarked as the obvious star, and Takeoff had been left off “Bad & Boujee.” Now Offset’s hotel-room dalliances are tracked like Watergate he was onstage at the Grammys during the acceptance speech for Best Rap Album, playing the supporting, redeemed(?) husband. ![]()
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