To anyone who has ever wondered why Memphis' Project Pat has six proper LP's and a parcel of mixtapes to his name when all he seems to offer is yippy knuckle-headed fury triangulated on a quality spectrum between Beanie Sigel and Jim Jones, there is an explanation. And it's perhaps rap's most known unknown secret: he's the brother of Three 6 Mafia's Juicy J.
It's not a very publicized relationship, partly because rappers usually associate with their chosen families and not with their blood (Del Tha Funky Homosapien and Ice Cube, cousins?), and partly because Pat's played strong enough a role in Three 6's hobgoblin hydraulic press over the past few years that the whole professional set-up doesn't seem like overt nepotism compared to, say, the way our federal government has been rolling.
But I digress. Three 6 have done and will do a million songs about drank, punching out haters, and property destruction, but no one fills the role of "enforcer" quite like Pat.
Pat's latest, Walkin' Bank Roll is straight in his high-sticking, head-thumping, one-part glee/nine-hundred-parts gristle wheelhouse. He gets to feast on machine-worked hooks (and the verses that love them) where he can splay out endless mantras that are as subtle in their phonetics are they are rhetorically crude: "I'm sweatin' like fool, I just popped a pill/ Lookin' down on you boys from chrome wagon wheels" (note the progression of sonorants). And Juicy and DJ Paul have doubled back on their post-Most Known Unknown sonics and given Pat (they produced the entire album) the appropriate selection of sinister pianos and twinkling strings likely sourced from either Willie Hutch or the soundtracks to the Resident Evil games.
Which would be fitting. Survival horror is Pat's bag. No matter what the song's title is, and no matter how far away it might seem be from violence-- "Good Weed", "Hate My Swag", "Motivated"-- Pat is going to push someone's wig back. Loving not just the moment of violence, but the setup narrative, Pat gets as close to artfulness as he can when he raps things like: "Fee fi fo fum!/ You can feel slugs of this the Mossberg shotgun, chest full of blood/ You could say that your life could end in a flash/ Like the wind blows dead brown leaves in the grass" ("Motivated").
Now those aren't fantastic lines, probably not even great ones, but Pat's immersed himself lyrically. And, regrettably, he's just as entrenched in that violence as a citizen. He finished a four-year sentence in 2005 for a parole violation-- attempting to purchase automatic rifles-- and, it should be noted, he's previously been to jail for robbery. His home, Memphis, is at or near the top of every nationwide murder statistic, and Pat has always been matter-of-fact about how many killers, dealers, and lords adore him. Liberal guilt be damned, he actually knows what he's rapping about.
So what keeps Bank Roll from descending into the void that claimed 2006's Crook By Da Book-- an album as jet deep and abyss-like in sound as Missy's Da Real World or Massive Attack's Mezzanine-- are the light production touches and grimace breaking moments in this pixie-stick hood opera. Juicy and Paul space out each song's instrumental intro and outro so Pat only has to spit two verses while keeping the track lengths decent, and they bring in a few handpicked guests to inject a little color in this crimson and kush-green on black affair-- Pimp C is near-perfect on the learned, caustic "Talkin' Smart".
Pat himself has a bizarre gallows humor and suddenly throws his voice into a high-register hiccup when he wants to emphasize a word. He'll get his "piiiimpin!" as squeaky as Katt Williams, and though he doesn't do anything as a funny as praising a woman for having "rhino legs" (as he did on Book's "Good Googly Moogly"), there's a lighter thematic touch here than on previous Pat albums.
Give credit to the architects for that. Juicy and Paul close out Walkin' Bank Roll with another free form, blissfully candid outro. They forget the name of the album they're supposed to be rounding out-- Paul: "What is the name of this album? Cause first he said 'Gimme Me' and now I think he changed to 'Rollin Dollar' or something?" Juicy: "No, 'Bank Roll' something about 'Bank Roll'..."-- hype up the next releases from Lil' Wyte, Chrome, and the new Choices movie, laugh, coin a few drinks, and forget a whole bunch of other shit. They are, in the words of Paul, "drunk, old, and high." Pat may have all the street medallions, but it sure sounds good to be the guys pulling the strings.
