Fetty Wap and French Montana are at different points in their careers. Both are northerners with cocaine-centric worldviews – French Montana comes from a rap outfit called Coke Boys and Fetty Wap's breakout single is called "Trap Queen" – but they don't share much else in common at the moment. Fetty's self-titled debut recently hit Number One on the Billboard 200 after a string of trap ballads became Top 10 hits, and French is in the process of trying to muster up some much-needed buzz after a commercial flop and a series of mixtapes that failed to stick. They are also two very different types of trappers: French is a materialist with tunnel vision and Fetty is a hopeless romantic penning Pyrex love poems. They go about dealing in different ways, but they traffic the same thing, and on their collaborative mixtape Coke Zoo they find common ground in cocaine rap's tropes—and in their shared penchant for hook-driven songs.
Coke Zoo disproves any notion that Auto-Tune is the great equalizer. When Fetty uses it, his voice soars. When French uses, phrases flat-line. It can be jarring going from Fetty's voice, which is robust and full, to French's, which is flat and without depth. French hitches a ride on the Fetty bandwagon for many of his best contributions, but his approach to writing is far more elementary (On "Freaky": "I'ma hit it like a dog/ Then I'ma pass it to my dog"), and it's Fetty's knack for melody that makes songs like "Power" so appealing.
Many of the ideas and sounds on Coke Zoo feel like Fetty Wap b-sides and leftovers: "Sometimes" is a leaked Fetty Wap song from July ("I Wonder") with a French verse tagged on. "Angel" once again showcases the stunning skill set of the trap balladeer ("And I make all this guap just to show you it's ours") before French Montana sucks out all of the energy with lifeless vocals and a mood-breaking verse. On "Gangsta Way", a repurposed Chris Brown song with a French verse, he takes an otherwise solid record and stifles its momentum. It's weird that French Montana, who is one of the more interesting characters in hip-hop, often writes such simple and boring raps, and on Coke Zoo,standing next to Fetty, he somehow seems even duller.
There are some outliers. Unsurprisingly, French delivers his best performances on the French Montana songs, where he gets to operate in his own space without Fetty creeping over his shoulder. The Lil Durk-featuring "See Me" is French's strongest use of Auto-Tune on the tape over a trudging rhythm, sax, and piano chords. On "Concentration", he takes a minor piano riff (courtesy of the Mekanics and MIXX) and makes one of his signature repetitive, bass-heavy jams. But as the chanting Fetty Wap joint "Damn Chainz" proves, there isn't much French can do better than his trapping Jersey counterpart. Coke Zoo is an interesting experiment that showcases why the stocks of these two rappers seem to be headed in two different directions.
