At the end of last year, Freeway embarked on a song-a-day scheme called the Month of Madness, giving away 32 songs to blogs in an attempt to build his buzz back up. In an environment when five new single-artist mixtapes come out every day, it didn't really work. But any random 10 songs from the Month of Madness would've made for a better album than Philadelphia Freeway 2, Free's inexplicable dud of a third album.
To put things bluntly, PF2 is the kind of album where rappers give interviews telling people not to buy it after it comes out. It's barely an album, really. At 40 minutes, its eight songs come weighed down with skits and prolonged instrumental outros and a remix that adds nothing but a quick (albeit great) Sheek Louch verse to a track we'd already heard. And that track is the one where Free talks about getting your baby's mother's gums all cummy (her response: "yummy yummy"), which we really didn't need to hear twice. Honestly, this album's mere existence is a puzzle. Free's never been a marquee name, but his two previous albums came with thick, expansive production and A-list guests. Both of them carried the all-important Jay-Z co-sign. And if 2007's Free at Last wasn't the event that his debut was, it still resonated as a truly solid under-the-radar major-label album.
As for PF2, it finds Free off Roc-A-Fella. The beats are like K-Mart versions of the swollen soul loops that Just Blaze contributed to the first Philadelphia Freeway. The only guest is Sheek, a problem for a rapper who's always shined playing his strained, urgent delivery off of his calmer, cooler guests. The one thing that comes close to saving Philadelphia Freeway 2 is Freeway himself. He's an incredible rapper. He killed himself animating those great Just Blaze beats, and he kills himself just as hard here. He spits almost every line like it's the last thing anyone will ever hear from him, and he pushes his voice in unexpected new directions even when he has to know nobody is paying attention. It's weirdly inspirational, hearing Free do some incredible work on tracks that could just never be worthy of him. He's like the guy who busts his ass at a minimum-wage go-nowhere job even though he knows he won't earn himself any extra money doing it. It's like he just wants to do a good job.
On "Murda Muzic", he snarls, "When I let out a buckshot, you shit-out-of-luck," hardening every syllable and turning his delivery into a barreling stutter. On "Around the World", he says, "Your motherfucking aunt run neighborhood watch," like it's a withering insult. On "Streets Won't Miss'em", he animates a tired kill-snitches concept through sheer demented attention to detail: "You shoulda did it like a soldier do it/ Now we dousing you with motor fluid." (He also calls a rat "Young Fievel", which is just funny.) And on "Crack Rap", he talks about seeing crack addiction slowly break down his uncle, then tells a story about the man begging him for the drug. That scene ends without resolution, Free's uncle finally telling him, "Tell your mama be over at the house later today to fix the cable box," the sort of mundane little touch that drives a heartbreaking story home that much harder.
Plenty of rappers these days are working the intersection between sneery tough-talk and soul-bearing confessions; almost none of them are doing it better than Freeway. Free is a furious talent, and it's sad to see him relegated to this weird little nothing of an album. But Philadelphia Freeway 2 is a detour, not an ending. Later this year, Free will decamp to Rhymesayers to release The Stimulus Package, his collaborative album with the great Seattle producer Jake One. This marks Free as the latest once-semi-popular rapper to defect to the welcoming arms of the indie-rap underground. It's always weird seeing that happen to people who showed up on Faith Evans singles not that long ago, but in Free's case, it can't come soon enough. On Rhymesayers, he'll be free of commercial pressure, and he'll get to crank out hard, uncompromising soul jams for people who actually want to hear them. That's a good place for him. Besides, the new songs he did with Jake One at SXSW musically obliterate anything on Philadelphia Freeway 2.
