When he released Deliverance in 2002, Bubba Sparxxx made a leap into the great unknown. He was already a curiosity, a white rapper with rural working-class roots, and he'd played his background for laughs on "Ugly", his breakthrough single, a couple of years earlier. But on Deliverance, he dug deeper, talking about poverty and marginalization with surprising candor while producer Timbaland spliced his usual futuristic thump with country samples and jug-band harmonicas. It was a bold and unprecedented move, and it predicted the rap-collabo feud that hit country a year later with Nelly and Tim McGraw's "Over & Over" and Cowboy Troy. Nobody noticed, of course. Deliverance sold far too few copies, and it remains one of the decade's great unheard albums.
Follow-up The Charm is Sparxxx's attempt to jump back into the mainstream after he tried and failed to change the way pop music sounds. The album-- the Georgia emcee's first since moving from Timbaland's Beat Club label to Purple Ribbon, the new imprint run by Big Boi of OutKast-- arrives in the shadow of "Ms. New Booty", the witless bass-and-sirens club-jam collaboration with the Ying Yang Twins, who, I swear to God, get dumber every time they open their mouths ("Sippin' on Patron, blong blong blong/ Shorty in a thong, whoa whoa whoa"). "Ms. New Booty" is depressingly boring, but it's done its job, giving Bubba his biggest-ever hit. And thankfully, it's an anomaly on The Charm, which is surprisingly great as conciliatory moves go.
At less than an hour, The Charm is short and slight for a mainstream rap album, and it has none of the genre-fucking courage of Deliverance. Big Boi doesn't rap on the album, and he only produces one song (the watery, diffuse almost-jazz of "Ain't Life Grand"), but the influence of Atlanta's Dungeon Family crew, of which Sparxxx and Outkast are included, is all over the album. The production, mostly from members of the DF-affiliated Organized Noize crew, is all happy, propulsive bounce: eerily spare whistles on "Claremont Lounge", gorgeous flecks of acoustic guitar and burbling bass on "As the Rim Spins", a chopped-up children's choir on the almost absurdly sunny "Wonderful". And Bubba has fully internalized the crew's mixed-up cocktail of swagger and introspection; even when he's boasting, he's both self-effacing and defensive. "If I ain't on ya list, shit, you can't win 'em all/ But until he died, most of y'all ain't fuck with Biggie Smalls," he says on the album-opener "Represent". Later, on "That Man": "Really don't expect no forgiveness for Deliverance/ Then again, I offer no apologies; I lived the shit." Conveying this stuff in an unpretentious aw-shucks drawl, he drips with charm but is likeably clumsy enough that it's almost shocking when he busts out an excellent double-time flow on "The Otherside".
That modesty also comes through on his goofy pickup lines (on "Wonderful": "Sit on my lap and let's talk about the first thing that pop up"). So it's an unpleasant surprise to hear an ugly new streak of misogyny on a couple of songs. He makes up for it on "Run Away", a sweet, tender story-song, rapping about two kids who leave home together on a bus over plaintive acoustic guitars and an understated drum track. Bubba wants to become a pop star, and he probably won't succeed, but he hasn't lost his heart.
