Richard Morales Jr., aka Gunplay, is widely known in the rap world for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with his talents as a rapper, including his class-clown personality (which has inspired at least one classic viral video), a prodigious (and recently kicked, he claims) cocaine habit (another viral video), and his prolonged house arrest while under investigation for an armed assault on his tax accountant’s office. The latter is the primary reason why the Def Jam-signed MC’s debut official album has yet to drop, despite its endorsement from Rick Ross, who recruited Morales for his Maybach Music Group years ago.
As much as he likes to present himself as a recklessly id-driven madman, and as entertaining as that aspect of his personality may be, it tends to stop at the door to the vocal booth. Those who know Morales only as a person balls-out crazy enough to snort coke in front of a Colombian policeman might expect his recordings to land somewhere between Waka Flocka and ODB, full of manic, scream-along club rippers. They might be disappointed to find out that his mixtapes in general, and this most recent one in particular, are emotionally complex, and more likely to find him grappling with the effects of his wild lifestyle than celebrating it.
Morales’s lawyers successfully got his house arrest lifted back in January, and the following month the case was dismissed despite the fact that there was surveillance video of him and his partner committing the crime. (His accountant refused to cooperate with prosecutors.) The aptly-named Acquitted is very much part of the tradition of the post-trial rap record, but unlike the form’s best-known examples (Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, for instance) it’s short on unalloyed triumph.
After a brief intro, consisting of audio from a local news report on Morales’s acquittal laid over an operatic string arrangement, Acquitted begins in earnest with “Salute Me”. Lyrically it’s just like you’d expect the opening track on a mixtape from a rapper fresh off of house arrest and dropped felony charges to sound like: wildly boastful, with the strong suggestion that the ability to elude a conviction is only part of his street prowess. But the music itself is far from celebratory, and much closer to funereal, with bleakly minimal verses from Gunplay and elegiac choruses delivered by Peryon J. Kee in a melodic, Nate Dogg-ish flow that’s downright mournful. If Morales is happy to be back on the streets he certainly doesn’t sound like it.
Other tracks serve up that conflicted sensation in subtler ways. “D.O.P.E.” has an uptempo beat with stuttering snares that add a Latin flair to the trap formula, but while the lyrics comprise a list of Morales’s dope-pushing credentials there’s something strangely resigned about his perspective, and the line “Dope gon’ get me way more money than this fucking song” inverts the usual corner-boy-to-superstar storyline into something sad and inescapable. And there’s something relentlessly self-destructive about a rapper fresh off a court case boasting about “pulling drive-by shootings with some mobbed-up hoodlums,” the way he does on the malevolently gleeful ode to gun violence “Drop Da Tint”, as if he was just begging prosecutors to open another case on him, which they probably would have anyhow.
Morales isn’t all internal struggles and felony crimes, though. Two of the brightest spots on Acquitted come when he lets his more uncomplicatedly manic side take the wheel. “Been Did It” is all noisy rave synths and quarter-note handclaps that highlights Southern rap’s transition from MDMA obsession to a straight-up infatuation with EDM. And the chorus to “Cocaina (Que Linda)”, which consists of the title (in English, “Cocaine (How Beautiful)”) delivered in a beyond-catchy way, could easily become the most out-of-control club chant-along of the year.
Despite many of these songs’ addictive qualities, Morales and his team are promoting Acquitted’s final cut, “Bible on tha Dash”, as its lead single, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s the most appealing fusion of his psyche’s various facets, strangely uplifting even with a vein of self-doubt running through it, and with a little polish it could easily fit in on the Hot 100. It also suggests how interesting it would be to see Gunplay as a pop artist, but that will almost certainly involve him finally getting his official debut out, something that his behavior and self-portraiture makes out to be far from a sure thing. Let’s hope he doesn’t succeed in fucking it all up before then.
