Ambition: Wale certainly can't be faulted for it. After his 2009 Interscope debut Attention Deficit bricked, selling a chastening 28,000 copies its first week, most presumed he would disappear soundlessly, like his fellow 2009 XXL Freshmen classmates Asher Roth and Charles Hamilton. He had failed to become a serious pop star, represent his D.C. hometown, or smuggle social consciousness into the rap mainstream-- his three bedrock campaign promises. But instead of disappearing, Wale caught the eye of Rick Ross, just as the Miami kingpin was transforming into commercial rap's all-devouring center of gravity, and climbed aboard Rozay's ascendant Maybach Music Group. Ambition, the result of a pairing nobody saw coming, inaugurates the curious second phase of Wale Folarin's increasingly fascinating career.
The record is a testament to the virtue in the album's title. Never say Wale doesn't learn from mistakes: Everything that dragged down Attention Deficit, from hipster-baiting to its bewildering guest roster, has been jettisoned, along with introspection and any lingering modicum of respect for women. On Ambition, Wale is reborn as an unrepentantly shallow strip-club rapper, and the production is a gleaming phalanx of freshly minted beats from Ross' MMG assembly line. The album is unmistakably a product of Planet Boss, the lurid neon kingdom of B-movie saxes and cartoon excess in which Rick Ross has built his empire. And Ambition provides a remarkably effective demonstration in how a shpritz of Planet Boss can jumpstart a flagging rapper's fortunes.
Wale's complete persona 180 will strike his original fanbase as repellantly cynical, and there is something vaguely unsavory and disorienting in the eagerness with which he embraces his new role. But it turns out that many of the gifts that got him noticed in the first place-- a nimble tongue, a high-stepping flow-- lend themselves as well to flossy nonsense about watches and women as they did to examining the sociopolitical implications of Soundscan. And Ambition is a high-velocity parade of flossy nonsense, with an extremely dense ratio of Headslaps-Per-Minute: "I'm sort of like Socrates in a Prada T"; "I aspire for awesome/ That requires some flossin'"; "Fuck rap, I get pussy off of haiku." There is a Sandra Bullock namedrop that references the 1992 sci-fi comedy Love Potion No. 9. Everything is fast-moving, breezily entertaining, and patently ridiculous.
Even swilling champagne at the winners' table, however, Wale remains something less than "fun." He always had the gift for seeing the negative that you might expect from someone who structured an entire mixtape around clips of old Seinfeld dialogue, and it rears its head in a lot of ranting about silencing his critics. "Sippin Moscato with models, havin exotic dishes/ But it don't mean shit unless I know that my genre respected," he gripes on "Don't Hold Your Applause". And his smooth-loverman approach, bluntly, needs fine-tuning: on the treacly slow jam "Lotus Flower Bomb", he offers the hilariously stilted compliment "Took you forever to get dressed/ I acknowledge your effort." Uh, thanks, Wale!
The production, however, from a cannily sourced collection of lesser-known beatmakers and big names, sounds uniformly incredible: Ambition is the first sign that Maybach Music Group has flowered into a full-blown production house. Mark Henry, who has produced some sledgehammer beats for Fat Joe, gives Wale the fleet-footed "Miami Nights", which pipes in some woolly sax from Ross' "Maybach Music II", and the window-fogging funk of "Double M Genius". Toomp chops up strings like early-millennium Just Blaze on "Legendary". MMG stalwart Tone P serves up, among others, the brain-rattling "Chain Music". The album will sound devastating pounding out of passing Escalades, and it is currently slated to pound out of many; early estimates peg Ambition's first-week sales at around 170,000.
Those numbers will surely provide a certain vindication for Wale, but above all they signal a triumph for Maybach Music. When Ross signed Wale, I joked that Rozay must have lost his taste for money. But his imprint has taken a temperamental rapper whose name had become synonymous with commercial kryptonite and molded him into a passable pop star. Listening to Ambition, I began to wonder what delirious commercial miracles Bawse might cook up for Pill, Meek Mill, and the other seemingly unmarketable rappers on his roster: Meek Mill with a No. 1? Pill with a gold plaque? Who knows. What Ambition proves beyond a doubt, however, is that commercial rap, right now, is Ross' world. People like Wale, if they are lucky, get to live in it.
