Sexyy Red’s breakout tape, Hood Hottest Princess, was filled with homages to the Southern rap that shaped her. She interpolated T.I.’s trap anthem “24’s,” spit over Project Pat’s menacing “Cheese and Dope” beat, searched for the hoes over a sample of Silkk the Shocker’s “It Ain’t My Fault,” and proudly proclaimed herself the “female Gucci Mane.” She borrowed quite a few Trina and Boosie flows as well, but it never felt like she was kneeling at the altar of the canon. Her rowdy hooks and raunchy lyrics were firmly rooted in her experiences: The provocation of a line like, “My coochie pink, my bootyhole brown,” was secondary to the self-possession. Do you know the colors of your holes?
That specificity and boldness don’t appear much on Yo Favorite Trappa Favorite Rappa, a listless album that’s fashioned like a 2000s mixtape. DJ Holiday shows up on the intro—“Holiday season!”—to hype up Sexyy as a larger-than-life legend who’s making “monumental trap shit,” but almost everything that follows is derivative. The beats lazily play into aughts pastiche, ignoring the 15 years of mutation that have morphed trap into plugg, rage, drill, and SahBabii. And Sexyy’s performances are lifeless, devoid of the color and insouciance that made Hood Hottest Princess a romp. It’s a painful double whammy: music that is both indistinct and boring.
A dull Sexyy Red album should be a tall order. A Black woman who embraces playfulness, her sexuality, and ghetto signifiers, Sexyy is a living rebuke to prigs and respectability. Even when she’s coasting, the audible pleasure she takes in saying wild shit makes her music easygoing. These songs take it too easy: Big hooks feel like first drafts. “Bitch, I’m awesome,” she repeats on “Bitch I’m Awesome,” ending the uninspired tune with a terrible surfer impression. “He wanna hang with a bad bitch,” she chants on Key Glock collab “Hang Wit a Bad Bitch,” a limp attempt at Memphis party rap.
The verses aren’t any better. Sexyy spends most of the record in stunt mode, but her pedestrian flexes barely scan as bragging. She doesn’t see the haters because her glasses are designer. She’s richer than all of her opps. Her closet looks like “the fuckin’ mall.” A man on her roster has locs—that’s the whole boast. Sexyy tends to freestyle, so her songs have always been loose, but this record doesn’t channel her id. Even the sex raps are vanilla. Not only does she describe herself as sexy ad nauseum (“I’m a sexy ass bitch”; “Sexy as fuck, and I got swag”), but there’s no character to the dirty talk. “I be doing shit she can’t ’cause I’m experienced/I’ll fuck a nigga while I’m on my period,” she says, as if she’s citing page 225 of the Kama Sutra.
The production is just as generic. The beats are stiffly period-appropriate, repurposing Shawty Redd snare rolls, bouncy Zaytoven keys, and snap music low end without flourish. “Rackies” samples D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” but isn’t remotely as geeked and danceable. “If You Want It,” which prominently features a loop of an Amerie line from LL Cool J’s “Paradise,” attempts Polow Da Don-style synth opulence, but lacks dynamism. The worst offender is closer “Yop (U Wit a Star),” produced by Zaytoven and Metro Boomin. It’s full-on cosplay, featuring “Aaaah! (169)” stabs, rolling percussion, marching band horns, and, of course, DJ Holiday shouting bullshit. Sexyy tries to ride the beat with ad-libs but gets smothered by the arrangement. The bombast of the song clashes with the aloofness of her style.
Yo Favorite Trappa Favorite Rappa as a whole oversells Sexyy’s position in the trap lineage. It doesn’t make sense for her to play to tradition, especially when she’s not turning in memorable hooks—a plank of trap. She’s not Gucci Mane’s heir apparent; he is a singular songwriter and vocalist, capable of wiggling into odd pockets and squeezing his mealy-mouthed voice into oblique shapes. He was always experimenting, always tinkering. Nor is Sexyy Trina’s understudy; Trina’s music is deeply deliberate about sex as a space of transaction: Her gutter talk is always in service of fulfilling specific needs. Sexyy’s style relies more on her low-key charisma: Her nonchalant flows and shameless oversharing channel the invincibility of young adulthood, the feeling that consequences are tomorrow’s concern and that today, this moment, this party, is all that matters. Without that freedom, Sexyy’s just another rapper.
