Gunplay is a blast from the past for rap obsessives. His precise lyrics and fluid rap style reflect the studious flows and manic personalities of hip-hop in the late 1990s—Redman, Busta Rhymes, or Rawkus-era Eminem. Had his debut album emerged in those years, he might have become a larger-than-life star. As it stands now, he is more living anachronism than Living Legend. The MMG rapper's Def Jam debut is being released four years after "Rollin" first sparked his street buzz nationally. Anyone expecting a classic in the vein of Muddy Waters will leave disappointed; for a charismatic rapper with a bombastic presence, his official debut feels slighter than it should, less a late '90s renaissance than a fading reminder.
Living Legend isn't bad, exactly. It's a consistent release with no substantial misfires, full of densely packed verbiage and grand gestures, reminiscent of a time when technique, style, and personality seemed inseparable, interrelated qualities in a rapper's arsenal. The best songs have a profundity that transcends the packaging around them: the wistful Miami sunset of "Just Won't Do" recalls his earlier career highlight "Bible on the Dash", its opening lines mirroring that song's most famous couplet ("I asked the pastor, what's the fastest way to heaven…?") before shifting into a spare narrative that sketches the hard-earned wisdom of a damaged man onto a twilight canvas. The recklessness of his public image—and sometimes, his real public behavior—belies, even magnifies, the earnest reflection that illuminates moments like these.
He recaptures this potency only occasionally. Closer "Dark Dayz" comes closest, with no wasted lines and artful, writerly composition that suggests simultaneous moods of pride and torment: "Happy-face sticker on the brick, still feeling miserable." Images pop, as he shifts effortlessly from the visual to the abstract, an interconnected web of ideas that suggests the craft of a detail-obsessed aficionado. As a writer, Gunplay is one of the best in rap, when he wants to be. And he's not limited to "deep thoughts"-type records; on more brolic cuts, like "White Bitch", his lyrics are vividly original: "Skinny as pasta with a big ol' mossberg/ Squares in my trunk and white all in my nostrils."
The album's midsection sags under its relative banality: Rick Ross feature "Be Like Me" sounds like a generic version of records Ross has been releasing over the past four or so years. And "Chain Smokin'" wastes a clever hook with a song that feels like a kush coma for more than three minutes, a must-fast-forward dead zone until Gunplay's verse. Lead single "Wuzhanindoe" is solid, but also dated, a cutting-room-floor version of guest rapper YG's spring 2014 release My Krazy Life. It also draws attention to the relative disparity in quality between the two artists' album statements. By any standard, Gunplay is the superior talent: bar-for-bar, emotional resonance, depth of feeling. But while his lyrics fill the page with evocative, fully-rendered ideas, his album feels like a half-step; YG's revitalization of '90s West Coast tropes, meanwhile, found the rapper exceeding his limitations song after song.
And that's Gunplay's major weakness: his art is focused on some powerful particulars at the expense of the whole. Perhaps, as a 36-year-old rapper who's lived quite a life—most of it, in fact—outside the studio, it's unfair to expect more. The distance between his standout records—"Rollin", "Jump Out", "Bible on the Dash"—and the average Gunplay song is considerable. Concept-driven cuts like "Tell 'Em" and "White Bitch" are lyrically strong, but are easily forgotten once the album has receded. The pathos of his unrealized potential deepens the colors of his best work, hinting at artistic depth that remains out of our sight.
