Young Dro is an unspectacularly spectacular rapper. He's humbly astonishing. How to explain this guy? He's more agile, more playful, and more confident than most; almost everything that comes out of his mouth sounds catchy, even when he's just ranting semi-incomprehensibly in skits about how fresh he is. The "should be famous" line is a tired one, so we'll just observe that he's definitely not famous, at least not nationally like his sometime-benefactor T.I. and his other Atlanta colleagues. He had one hit in 2006, ("Shoulder Lean"), but he is a rapper's rapper, a nerd's favorite who will probably be a local legend in his hometown for the rest of his life. His legacy is secure; his epitaph is written.
The Local Rapper Who Just Can't Get Over is everywhere, in every city-- here in NYC, we have Jadakiss, their grumpy-uncle patron saint, but you can find them in Philly (Young Chris, Peedi Crakk) to Chicago (Bump J) to L.A. (Kurupt, WC). Sometimes, these guys are their own worst enemies, smacking home runs when no one's looking and freezing up when the floodlights hit them. Some of them just seem content to work on a ground level, surrounded by familiar associates and making the music that retains their hometown flavor. That's Young Dro. "Freeze Me" was a classic of Atlanta hip hop in 2010, and did as much to push the style of street rap forward as Rick Ross' "B.M.F." from the same year. But you wouldn't know the song was a classic unless you lived in Atlanta or learned secondhand.
Rap's folk history is usually written by these sorts of guys as much as by the megastars they bump elbows with, and Dro has been playing the mascot role to the hilt for the past six years. He can be counted on to put out slightly overlong mixtapes once or twice a year, each one containing at least five or six breathtaking, pull-it-back-six-times scorchers. Ralph Lauren Reefa, which was made available a few weeks ago, is shorter and several notches more consistent than usual, partly thanks to the involvement of DJ Burn One, an Atlanta rap producer with an unwavering devotion to the heavier, humid end of Atlanta's heritage. The two previously collaborated on Future Legends, Vol. 2; with Burn One curating, Young Dro's occasional reliance on cheap-sounding beats disappears.
Dro can loop rings around any wide-open, Southern beat you give him: If you hand him an instrumental made up of just a few bleeps and an 808 clap, like "Smell That Pack" on RLR, he will make it feel like a piece of Silly Putty in seconds. If you sit him back in a plush piece of after-party VIP-room rap ("On Set"), he will pummel its surface ceaselessly. His writing is packed tight with alliteration, colorful slang, and the occasional paper-cut-size confessional ("Momma get sicker, she need a liver") and his sense of rhythm is mind-boggling. When he flexes effortlessly into double-time, you can feel your hair blow back: It might take you six replays of "Check Me Out"'s first verse to fully hear it once.
When Young Dro gets soulful or quiet, he sounds a little less comfortable: "She Gone" is a slightly awkward remorseful-player song, "Dreamer" a slightly strained achiever's anthem. But when he just lets his mind and mouth fly, he's unstoppable. On "Laid Back", he sets up the line "supermodel bitches flying down from New Zealand" just so he can rack up a series of increasingly dazzling slant rhymes for it: "my boo vegan" and "a pound of new tree, and" are two highlights. It's like watching someone pound you in Words With Friends while simultaneously cooking dinner and moonwalking. It seems unfair, somehow. All said, Ralph Lauren Reefa is one of his strongest tapes in a while, showing him at his lyrical, funny, vivid, local-hero best.
