In 2010, the New Orleans rapper Curren$y scored the two biggest hits of his career. The rapper, born Shante Franklin, had once been a gangster rapper, one of the semi-anonymous weed carriers that populated Lil Wayne’s Young Money Entertainment imprint. Like so many of his fellows, Curren$y, who frequently refers to himself as Spitta, wasn’t promoted properly while on YME, but he also was an ill fit for the label’s gangster-lite subject matter at the time.
After leaving Young Money, he hit upon a formula that worked better: rapping about his smoked-out lifestyle, an aspirational, unpretentious, working man’s fantasy of fast cars, fast women and copious amounts of THC. Curren$y found his trademark style, discussing that subject matter with a flow which didn’t so much find a beats’ pockets as create creases of its own. Pairing those raps with the lush boom-bap of the producer Ski Beats on the Pilot Talk records yielded two near-perfect albums of stoner fantasia.
He has not made a project with the same kind of impact since. That has a lot to with artistic inertia—like many prolific musicians, Curren$y can seem more interested in the present, cranking out song after song, than he does in making specific creative statements. The closest he gets is warmed-over concepts like the one that powers his new mixtape The Drive In Theatre, a tired tribute to the Godfather that’s ostensibly supposed to double as a paean to movies in general.
But the Pilot Talks weren’t great because they provided an insider’s look into the aviating life—Curren$y’s concepts have traditionally been smoked-out deviations more than anything else. Instead, they functioned as mood albums, the lush beats creating a perfect atmosphere for Spitta’s offbeat flow to come in and make itself at home. And the new mixtape is the first since that 2010 duo to create a similar atmosphere, making it the rapper’s strongest project in nearly four years.
A lot of that has to do with the guiding hand of Thelonius Martin, who produced just under half the songs here and who keeps it orchestral, with brass-happy, atmospheric boom bap that provides the perfect backdrop to Curren$y’s diaristic scribbling. “Vintage Vinyard” is a great example of the intimacy on display. It’s a jazzy, off-the-cuff tale of the successful man’s life, opulent, but also filled with paranoia, reflections on one’s place in the artistic hierarchy and quiet moments with the wife. “Hi-Top Whites” keys in on a single detail about a woman, but in the course of getting to the shoe-talk, gives an absorbing account of a day in the life. Curren$y is smoothest over beats like these, where his leaping from one topic to another feels less unfocused and more in sync with the improvisational jazz providing a foundation below him.
Even when Martin is not in charge, the album’s producers do a good job at keeping the vibe consistent. The production team of Cardo and Young Exclusive contribute a blown out bass to “$ Sign Migraine” buts it’s the floating mid-tempo tones that help the song to vibe with the rest of the album. Cooking Soul, who fans will recall from their late-aughts remix albums, come through with the first truly absorbing beat on the project, the mellow backdrop of “Stove Top".
If there is a uniting theme on The Drive In Theatre, it’s that Curren$y seems more reflective than usual, a rap veteran reconciling himself with his place in the music business. The posse cut “Grew Up In This” includes a hook that could be interpreted as an assertion of gangster authenticity (“I grew up in this shit”) but it seems to double as a contemplation of being a working man’s rapper, tirelessly grinding out songs and navigating a perilous industry with finesse. “Grew Up In This” also features excellent verses from both Young Roddy and Freddie Gibbs, the former a Curren$y protege who seems to finally have found his own voice, the latter a rapper with a career path similar to and a record of making great songs with Curren$y.
Curren$y has always had good taste in collaborators and the other features on the album are equally effective. Fiend and Smoke DZA both sound great over the handclaps and sax that power “The Usual Suspects.” And Action Bronson saves what might otherwise be a weak opening track, “Godfather Four.” (The beat loops The Godfather’s theme music, which sounds great, but is awfully gimmicky*.)*
That beat is just one of the many ways in which The Drive In Theatre is studded with the trappings of a much weaker concept album—there are also plenty of unnecessary snippets of dialogue from Coppola’s movies. But just as Pilot Talk became a euphemism for the kind of lifestyle rap that Curren$y excels at, the movie theater signifiers mostly evaporate to reveal a reflective rapper with a keen eye for detail and a true gift for beat selection: the atmosphere is cinematic, in scope if nothing else. Curren$y puts out a lot of music, and fans could be forgiven for missing a mixtape here and there. But The Drive In Theatre, premiered on Datpiff with next-to-no promotion, proves once again, that Curren$y is one of a certain group of artists that it pays to keep your eye on.
