Here’s something that doesn’t seem like it should be true: 2 Chainz is five years older than Lil Wayne. Of course, in the mid-’90s Wayne willed his way into the Cash Money Records offices as a quasi-intern—and then onto radio and television—before he was old enough to drive; of course, the arc of 2 Chainz’s early career more closely resembles an EKG readout, to the point where the first song on 2007’s long-delayed Playaz Circle debut was a paean to missed release dates called “Dear Mr. L.A. Reid.” And still, this little piece of biographical data seems wrong.
When 2 Chainz finally became a star, in the early 2010s, it was in a distinctly post-Tha Carter III world. Mixtapes were still idiosyncratic and unmonetizable, but rap was in its brief flirtation with EDM, and the collapse of the CD sales economy meant only established megastars or exaggerated personas like his could cut through the din. Even the way the two close friends have processed, in their solo work, their relationships to the past are incongruent, with Wayne perpetually shadowboxing the greats of prior generations while 2 Chainz tinkers with prestige objects self-consciously positioned as modern successors to The Blueprint.
Unfortunately, Welcome 2 Collegrove, the second album to pair these two MCs, is profoundly unstuck in time, dotted with the vestiges of two bygone eras but imbued with few of those eras’ charms. The liner notes recall an entire era including SARS, Perez Hilton, and Iraq war protests through the Obama campaigns: DJ Toomp and STREETRUNNER, Bangladesh and Big K.R.I.T., Usher and Marsha Ambrosious. But the LP is frustratingly polished, defaulting to pristine mixes and beats that are crisp, thin, and wholly anonymous. (This extends, sadly, to those from the most beloved contributors: Mannie Fresh’s crowded, directionless “Big Diamonds” and Havoc’s pair of middling tracks, including a stale 36 Chambers riff.) Combined with verses that frequently prioritize competency over invention, these tracks make for an album that only intermittently gestures toward either rapper’s signature styles.
On Da Drought 3 or T.R.U. REALigion—even on the highlights from 2016’s superior Collegrove—there was an air of delirious impulsivity, the sense that Wayne or 2 Chainz might, in the next moment, conjure a flow or an image that no human being had ever before conceived of. There was a looseness of structure that allowed for hooks or high stakes but required neither. Welcome 2 Collegrove drags each artist into the middle of the road where even some inspired premises (the mutation, on “Crazy Thick,” of Wayne’s infamous deposition video into a strip club instrumental, or his tight little seesaw cadence on “Long Story Short”) are sanded down to their least memorable versions. This is true on the utterly rote “Millions From Now” and the practically narcotized “Transparency,” the schmaltzy “Can’t Believe You” and “Godzilla,” a song as “lukewarm” as 2 Chainz describes a particular woman’s mouth.
When Welcome 2 does click, it’s almost always due to Wayne, who seems to snap upright halfway through the album’s runtime. Near the midpoint, on the overproduced “Significant Other,” where the desperation in his writing and performance finally converge, his verse begins to sound—as on so much of his best work—like an impossibly complex house of cards, the tone and momentum of each line resting on not just one but four, eight, 12 bars that preceded it. But this verse just a precursor to his turn on the Benny the Butcher-assisted “Oprah & Gayle,” where he pushes the outer bounds of the beat’s measures in either direction, rapping at first at the extreme front end of every bar—and later dangling off their back end.
The moments that do stick in the mind—Wayne camping outside an enemy’s house for so long that he starts cooking s’mores, 2 Chainz boasting that he’s “been poppin’ since your first computer”—are scattered throughout dozens of placeholders. Where the mixtapes that saw these two find their footing often felt like first drafts, with all the excitement and jaggedness that entails, the songs on Welcome 2 Collegrove too often resemble the tenth pass on ideas no one loved in the first place, tweaked and rearranged until they’re perfectly fine.
