Bun B was never meant to be a solo artist. As half of the great Texas rap duo UGK, Bun found his ideal complement in partner Pimp C. Bun brought the gravity and the technical prowess, and Pimp, besides being an incredible producer, had both the snarling fuck-the-world charisma and the expansive sense of vision that Bun always lacked. As a duo, they counterbalanced each other perfectly, Bun playing the sage big brother to Pimp's guttural loose cannon. And every time Bun has released a solo album, it's been at a time when Pimp was unavailable. (Pimp was in prison when Bun released 2005's Trill, and he died before the release of 2008's II Trill.) It's increasingly becoming obvious that Bun is somewhat adrift without his old partner.
Trill and II Trill both had great moments, but they didn't work as unified albums. Instead, Bun adapted his style to his guests and producers, turning each LP into a patchwork of whatever was popular in rap that particular month. Trill O.G. works in much the same way-- except this time, Bun is all out of great moments, and it's less attuned to the styles he adapts. Throughout, he works in the same weary and vaguely clumsy cadence, never bringing the ebulliently eloquent verve he brought to his best UGK verses. Instead he merely seems to dutifully plug away every time he touches a mic.
It's tough to imagine how a rapper as great as Bun has managed to turn out an album as consistently turgid and leaden as this. After all, it's not like he's forgotten how to rap-- so far this year he's put in impressive guest appearances for guys like Gucci Mane and Yelawolf. But on Trill O.G., that eternal baritone-rumble feels tired and beaten-down. He's no longer packing his verses with tricky internal rhymes, and everything he says feels like something he's said better before. Worse, he's developed a new tendency toward forehead-slap dumb punchlines: "Go ask the white boys; they'll say you he's totally tubular/ Fuckin' bad bitches rub my dick against they uvula."
It's not a bad album, exactly. Bun's voice, even at its clumsiest, carries weight. It's fun to hear him on a DJ Premier beat on "Let 'Em Know", even if it's not the landmark event a 1996 collab between these two might've been. The many guests all seem to realize they're working with a legend, so everyone works hard. And it's a guest roster packed with stars. Very few rappers, after all, carry the same goodwill as Bun does within rap, and almost no others could wrangle two Drake guest spots in summer 2010. But the best songs here don't feel like they belong to Bun. Rather, "Just Like That" and "Countin' Money" feel like they belong, respectively, to Young Jeezy and to the Gucci Mane/Yo Gotti tandem, and Bun feels like a guest on his own songs.
Besides that, there's a weird outdated feel to the album; too many of the songs feel like attempts to cross over to a rap mainstream that barely exists anymore. There's a reason that not too many people are recruiting T-Pain for choruses in 2010. And too many of the tracks come from the relatively unknown Texas producer Steve Below, whose beats feel like shallow parodies of the Houston rap that was popular five years ago. Bun doesn't have to make music this safe and leaden these days. In recent months, we've heard veterans like Big Boi and DJ Quik come with some of the most admirably weird records of their careers. But Bun is content to plug away at the same model, with diminishing returns. It's a shame.
