DJ Khaled is right, you guys. Pop music has been exceptionally global in recent years, whether it's New York guitar bands borrowing ideas from Africa, Sri Lankan-born singers from London keeping an ear to Brazilian favelas, Timbaland's space-age twists on bhangra going from "Get Ur Freak On" fresh to Hard Candy stale, or Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Kids in their bedrooms in Portland are making music influenced by German minimal techno. And instead of a British Invasion, bands from Scandinavian countries have found a place on U.S. listeners' iPods.
None of which makes We Global any better-- as a catchphrase (basically what Khaled does on disc) or as an album. Whatever listeners around the world wanted to learn about Khaled's curatorship of the soaringly shallow Miami synth-rap sound, they could've gleaned from the Palestinian-American Miami radio and mixtape DJ's first LP, 2006's surprisingly coherent Listennn: The Album. If that wasn't enough, last year's rote We the Best gave us one A-list posse cut, "We Takin' Over", with the kind of unhinged Lil Wayne verse that made the rapper's current victory lap look all but foreordained. On We Global, Khaled surveys the world as if he owns it, too, but we provincial: Khaled owns Miami, or at least "Miami", an increasingly clumsily trodden musical destination he's ready and willing to run as far as it takes him.
As usual, Khaled can be counted on for one star-studded summer jam, and that's first single "Out Here Grindin'", with another empty Akon earworm, plastic Runners synths, and Lil Boosie spelling out Khaled's slogan "I.n.d.e.p.e.n.d.e.n.t."-style. Boosie's weaselishly yawped half-verse outshines Rick Ross' thug autopilot, Plies' get-me-coppers rasp, We the Best signee Ace Hood's guttural bank boasts, and even Trick Daddy as shit-talking Miami elder statesman. Wayne's verse from the single isn't on the album; his personality is missed, if not his uncharacteristically pedestrian rhymes ("Regularly irregular," eh? Try eating fewer rappers, more fiber). Second single "Go Hard" is nearly as solid, with Kanye West confronting haters on behalf of "the hood I'm from," alongside "Good Life" partner T-Pain. Here, West tests out the Auto-Tune effect he uses more memorably on Young Jeezy's great "Put On" and his own "Love Lockdown".
The overall stylistic consistency that made Listennn unusual now makes for an exhausting hour. "Go Ahead" is what John Legend's "Green Light" might've been if it had been a hip-hop posse cut produced by the Runners instead of an R&B song produced by André 3000. On the garish Cool & Dre track "I'm On", Nas drops the political focus of Untitled to flash his expensive tastes and tell us (no, really) "I need a vasectomy." Timbaland protege and "We Takin' Over" producer Danja comes up with a slightly slinkier beat this time for "She's Fine", with Busta Rhymes out-nastying Missy Elliott and Sean Paul-- though really, this could've been made any time in the past few years. Jamaica gets better representation from Baby Cham, of "Ghetto Story" fame, whose siren-blaring collaboration with Rick Ross on "Bullet", is, unlike most of We Global, more impressive than its roster. Ross is on this thing four times. Fat Joe is twice.
Just in case you thought Khaled's days of screaming out "We the best" were over, there's the title track, another Runners production with a lazy Trey Songz hook. On it, Khaled proclaims not just his newfound international status, but also his ongoing the-bestness. When producers the Inkredibles finally give us a break from sunburnt synths on soul-sampling "Red Light", the Game's bull charges connect even as his tendency toward name-dropping reaches new levels of self-parody ("Leonardo DiCaprio Da Vinci"). Not even the ever-reliable Bun B can save the second-tier rappers on "Final Warning", in which the Inkredibles go back to sounding like every other Khaled producer. Pitbull drops plenty of local references on finale "Defend Dade", but a more interesting defense might be to tell some of Florida's approximately 112,000 former felons they've been restored the right to vote (97,000 Floridians voted for Nader in 2000; Gore lost to Bush by 537 votes). Whatevs, we global now.
