For all the pre-release hype-- one of southern rap's more idiosyncratic auteurs spitting hard-eyed realism over beats from one of the key flame-keepers for golden age boom-bap-- Death of a Pop Star turned out to be a strange, slight, largely disappointing record. It should have been the album to reverse David Banner's creative slide. But instead of hellfire righteousness over back-to-basics bangers, we got 10 tracks heavy on drippy love raps, dumbly repetitive hooks, and beats suspiciously lacking in thump-value.
Banner made a splash with 2003's Mississippi: The Album, a fascinating mix of amoral thugging and mournful moralizing. After that he mostly ditched the interesting side of his persona-- erudite everyman torn between Southern pride and sorrow over the down-and-out realities of Southern life-- in search of BEP-level hits. This quixotic quest reached an ugly apotheosis with 2008's The Greatest Story Ever Told, where the few moments of politicized rage were smothered and made facile by the icky, half-assed attempts to keep up with the Auto-Tuned Joneses.
In that light, even the title, Death of a Pop Star, seemed promising, a chance for Banner to disavow his attempts to create top-selling ringtones and get back to the fury that once made him one of the quasi-mainstream's most interesting figures. The duo maybe even went into the studio intending to make their Illmatic: a dose of classicist rap intensity, one MC going hard over no-filler beats. What they turned out instead is, like all of Banner's albums since Mississippi, a muddled hybrid of styles that clash more often than they mesh. Many tracks have an awkwardly smooth R&B vibe that diffuses Banner's decidedly non-smooth energy. And Banner's version of "soul rap," his emotionally naked bluesy drawl, was already a hundred times more interesting than the antiseptic pop-soul stabs on Death, tracks like "Slow Down" which have as much grit as the Ace of Base tunes the song's hook recalls.
The album as a whole is as overloaded with guest stars as the way longer Greatest Story Ever Told. True, Death of a Pop Star displays better taste in collaborations than Banner's last few albums. But what's the point of snagging Erykah Badu instead of Chris Brown if you're going to task her with a chorus as inane as "and I get real silly?" Throughout Death decent singers and rappers keep showing up to drop dashed-off hooks in what feels like a rather desperate attempt to turn these slickly produced loops into honest-to-god songs. And speaking of loops: Though 9th Wonder cements his well-earned rep for spotting the perfect fluttery soul samples to color a track, the actual beats on Death are mostly slight, skittery things, lacking the low-end force that made folks like Pete Rock and Dilla heroes to folks other than crate-diggers.
Lyrically, the album's a mess. Banner's obviously a smart guy, but as soon as he starts kicking game his IQ seems to drop about 40 points. Entry-level come-ons like "Stutter"-- "look at your hips, look at your physique, you're so fine from behind girl, I be scared to speak"-- mark him as one of rap's least convincing lotharios. The saddest thing is that "Stutter" is Banner's flow at his best on Death, nimble in a way makes you wish he had something meatier to sink his skills into. And the few moments of overt social comment on Death feel like a pastiche of Banner's older, more committed songs. "They call it the trap because most hoods is just that" is the kind of water-weak insight you could expect from the most apolitical gangsta, but worse, Banner just doesn't sound as pained, engaged, or enraged as he once did on songs like "Mississippi" or "Fire Falling".
There are moments throughout Death of a Pop Star that suggest the better album that might have resulted with a little more focus and intensity. You still hope Banner gets there again eventually; he's too odd and talented, too much his own man, to wind up an also-ran in hip-hop history.
