2015’s Dark Sky Paradise was a massive and hard-earned leap forward for Big Sean. When pressed, he’s a very good rapper, and the right selection of beats framed his words with a sense of new importance. The album was also unapologetically mean. Of course, its breakout hit was “I Don’t Fuck With You,” but the same bitterness was applied across the LP to foes and exes alike. Perhaps no rapper is as obsessed with his own dick as Big Sean, and given the opportunity to brag and scorn, he found a comfort zone. I Decided. attempts to bury that mean streak, and present the 28-year-old in a mature light. In short: It doesn’t work.
On I Decided., Sean continues to recount his come-up—a banal narrative for a platinum-selling artist who’s cracked the Top 5 with each album. The record’s new twist is that Sean is quickly growing weary of fame and being in the public view. Bemoaning success is certainly a quick ticket to earn more success (see: Graham, Aubrey; West, Kanye), but Sean conveys no details or feelings to make his struggle compelling. “I don’t want [paper] if it can’t change shit drastically, dramatically,” he claims on “Halfway Off the Balcony,” but there’s no sense of what change he wants, and therefore nothing to connect to. It doesn’t help that he still leans on forehead-slap lines like, “Everything gold like I just practiced alchemy,” from the same song.
Sean also badly wants to show us that he is an album artist, not a singles rapper. “Voices in My Head / Stick to the Plan,” is a two-part would-be epic in which nothing of consequence happens. Over a spare, diffuse beat, he hears voices telling he “could do better.” Then the always-powerful Metro Boomin tag appears, as does a captivating beat, and Sean runs down the various distractions in his life—women, money, fame, “negative energy,” etc.— but the undertone is that “the plan” is making hits. In attempting to demonstrate how layered and complicated he is, Sean reaffirms what we already knew about him—he’s better when rapping well-delivered nonsense over heavy beats.
And so the best moments remain the pop songs. “Bounce Back” has already gone gold, and it sticks to the Dark Sky Paradise script as much as anything else on the new record. Sean does an honest-to-God Cartman impression on the song, suggesting that he’s at his best when he doesn’t take himself too seriously. The other single, “Moves,” is equally effective—Sean’s agile flow is his best weapon to distract you from his litany of clunkers, jokes about Jason Statham and Mini-Me and Channing Tatum all blurring together into a rubbery and enjoyable bounce.
On the album’s best song, “Sacrifices,” Sean raps, “I came a long way from that ‘Marvin & Chardonnay.’” Quite literally, it is a true statement: The Finally Famous single came out over five years ago, and like the rest of the world, Sean has had thousands of days to deal with life’s quotidian pressures. But while he has become incrementally more skilled over the years, not much else has changed. Throughout I Decided., Sean conflates the passing of time with growth and progress. Nothing on I Decided., however, suggests that he has gained perspective worth sharing or to which he should devote a whole album. He continues to be a talented pop act attempting to be something he is not.
