I wish this could be just a series of jokes. I wish I'd never heard Comin' Out Hard or Ridin' Dirty or even www.thug.com. I wish we could all just be droll about Rick Ross' need for a bra, his insistence on rhyming the same word with the same word multiple times a verse, and his little waddle in the opening 45 seconds of the "Speedin'" video. But here it comes, marching into the commercial American sunlight. The second album from the Miami rapper whose sole strength as an MC is that he may or may not have touched a kilo of soft a few times in his life. Trilla, Rick Ross's inexplicable second album, is every bit a fatty contemporary American disaster.
Synthesizers fill every space where things like human voices or silences might go. Ross struggles with negotiating the most basic couplets. He doesn't so much articulate words and phrases as simply drop his jaw and eject whatever. The only moderate successes are songs ("Luxury Tax") where Ross lets MCs like Trick Daddy and Lil Wayne focus on things like diction and syntax. "Speedin'", the sole arena of fun on Trilla, at least has Ross trying to squeeze out some item-based personality: "Caesar's salad/ Caesar's palace/ You not a boss little nigga 'cause your cheese is average!" Of course, that fun is all part of an unconscious self-parody-- DJ Khaled and Diddy and Fat Joe and the Runners (whose presence on a CD is becoming reason enough to shred it) each helming their own speedboat, the horsemen of a delusional costume party.
Hip-hop fans invested in history and emotion are bound to recoil at song titles like "DJ Khaled Interlude" and shake their heads at Ross' eleventh-hour attempts at humanizing himself (they're on album-concluding "I'm Only Human" and involve chocolate milk-related flatulence). Ross's attempts at self-definition-- "This Me", "Here I Am", "The Boss"-- are as calculated and chilly as his odes to consumption are revealingly spirited ("Maybach Music", "Billionaire", "Luxury Tax"-- in that sequence, no less). Repetition is one thing, but having America's favorite ASIMO, T-Pain, squawking "Boss! Boss! Boss!" is something else entirely.
Maybe it's a question of geography. A friend from Florida explained to me last week why non-Floridians could never "get" Miami rap. He illustrated it as a matter of utility: New Yorkers listen to rap composed in and designed for suffocating, intimate, cell-like rooms. California rap is for slow cruising, oven-baked afternoons, and suburbs that can turn deadly on you, literally, around the corner. Miami? Peacock posing on South Beach, tops down, windows down, and vacuum synthesizers spilling into the atmosphere like digital locust hordes. In that case, consider Trilla, in all its deaf, shrieking power, a sound that sadly symbolizes the blissful complacency of now.
