It’s a wonder Young Dolph made it out of Charlotte. On the night of February 25, Dolph was sitting in an SUV on the 600 block of North Caldwell Street, in the city’s First Ward. At about 6:30 p.m., shots rang out: dozens and dozens, hitting cars and buildings and pavement and metal. Dolph was the target. He walked away unscathed; authorities eventually recovered as many as 100 bullet casings from the scene. Five weeks later, an album, Bulletproof, was out. The tracklist spelled out a response: “100 Shots in Charlotte, But I’m Bulletproof So Fuk’em, That’s How I Feel, All of Them, I’m So Real I Pray for My Enemies, I’m Everything You Wanna Be. SMH.”
Bulletproof was not the best piece of Dolph’s catalog—this critic would argue for the similarly brief King of Memphis, from 2016—but it was close. And it was certainly his most vicious release, from Zaytoven and Cassius Jay’s preposterous drums on “I Pray for My Enemies” to the chillingly concise biography on “I’m Everything You Wanna Be.” Not all of it was overtly about the North Carolina shooting, but the parts that were looked at death and cackled: “How the fuck you miss a whole hundred shots?” At one point, he mentions that since the shooting, he’d been listening to nothing but Pac.
Last month, gunmen targeted Dolph again. This time, they didn’t miss. After a scuffle outside a Hollywood hotel, he was shot multiple times in the torso; he was taken to the hospital, initially in critical condition, but he survived and recovered. It’s hard to extricate these incidents from Dolph’s musical career. Both of the shootings were later connected to fellow rappers: a friend of sworn enemy Yo Gotti was charged with attempted murder in the Hollywood shooting, and another Memphis rapper, Blac Youngsta, turned himself in in connection to Charlotte.
Dolph’s status as a still-living human being is remarkable, but for the most part, Thinking Out Loud doesn’t treat it as such. It’s tantalizingly tunnel-visioned. In fact, the new album recalls a line from early on King of Memphis: “Since I was 17, I ain’t been able to get no rest.” After two attempts on his life in seven months, Dolph has one-upped his would-be assailants by simply getting back to work.
The album hits its stride in its middle section: the Mike WiLL Made-It- and 30 Roc-produced “Drippy” is thick with paranoia, and when Dolph raps “You a peasant, you cannot come near me,” he hits “peasant” so ferociously that it sounds like a real threat. That song, paired with “Believe Me,” makes for a two-track suite that feels less like the middle of a rap album than a conflicted fever dream. Dolph is a blunt writer and a uniformly direct vocalist; he can be laugh-out-loud funny, but he undersells nearly everything. He tends to organize his songs around an easily reducible thought or topic, but the verses themselves lurch from thought to thought. Beats like the ones he receives here are the ideal setting for Dolph’s plaintive style.
Thinking Out Loud is mostly a solo affair, but the guest turns are tremendous. On “Go Get Sum Mo,” Gucci Mane sounds fascinatingly like he did in the early Obama years, as if molasses is dripping from his mouth and he were carrying and extra 70 pounds. And even from his laconic pocket, he’s in turn outrapped by 2 Chainz, who compares himself to a sea creature and wears Dolce & Gabbana to bed.
There’s no question, though, that the album’s crown jewel is its closing song, “While U Here.” Instead of meditating on his own mortality, Dolph turns the focus outward, fretting about his parents, his incarcerated little brother, the cancer that’s overtaking his best friend’s mom. He visits his grandmother’s grave and mulls over what kind of example he can set for his son; he asks himself, “Do I think too hard, or do I think enough?” It’s the kind of personal inventory you take when you come face-to-face with death. But instead of retreating into personal myth-making, it’s made Dolph even more empathetic for those around him. Thinking Out Loud is a brisk, rewarding listen—it’s the psychological heft that sneaks up on you at the end.
