The 13th song on T.I.'s awkwardly-titled new album Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head is called "Hello". This, in and of itself, is not noteworthy event: many rappers have made a song with that title. But T.I. has now made two: a completely different and altogether better song named "Hello" appeared on his world-conquering 2006 album King. "Hello" is not the worst song on Trouble Man, though its schlocky, "that guy from Goodie Mob ain't never coming back" Cee-Lo hook ensures it's not one of the good ones either. But the oversight of its title demonstrates almost every single design flaw of Trouble Man, which is simultaneously lazy and distracted, ignoring the lessons of the past and while offering reminders that it didn't have to be this way.
The real mystery of T.I.'s later albums is that there's no glimpse of the guy who can still absolutely destroy tracks when he's up to it. Witness non-LP one-offs like "Hear Ye, Hear Ye" or shift the "feat." so tracks like Rick Ross' "Maybach Music III", Drake's "Fancy", Future's "Magic" (Remix), "Big Beast", or "In the A", could all serve as a foundation for a phenomenal T.I. record that still manages to achieve the same goals of demonstrating his commercial clout as well as his artistic malleability. None of them sound anything like "24's", "Rubber Band Man", or "What You Know".
As with every studio album since King, Trouble Man promises a cohesive, thematically sound concept about The State of Clifford Harris that it can't deliver. At least he tries for a spell: Trouble Man is interspersed with re-creations of his multiple arrests and the introduction is indeed rapped over the Marvin Gaye original. But here's a list of the phrases that pop up within the first minutes of "The Introduction": "livin' on the edge," "push it to the limit," "catch me if you can," "I am who I am." T.I. has one of those voices where it's pleasure to hear him rap even if he's saying nothing at all, but is that really what you want?
If so, Trouble Man is 70 minutes and change of mostly that. "Trap Back Jumpin", "Go Get It", and "Addresses" are just more examples of the utilitarian trap muzik that pads out his recent work, the specificity and wisdom of which continues to have an inverse relationship with T.I.'s advancing age. More disheartening is how the tracks drawn from T.I.'s actual experience are sunk by cliché. "Wonderful Life" and "Hallelujah" close out Trouble Man by directly addressing T.I.'s prison bid, but whatever effect his personal disclosures may have is neutralized by taking the artistic path of least resistance: the latter leans on a Christ complex and Leonard Cohen, the former has Akon interpolating Elton John's "Your Song", which...I really do mind. And when Pharrell coined T.I.'s most famous accolade by calling him "the Jay-Z of the South," I don't think he meant it as a prediction that Tip would also make a track called "Guns 'N Roses" with an unbearable arena-rock chorus. Yeah, trading Lenny Kravitz for P!nk seems like progress on some level, but at least the one from Blueprint 2 was about McDonalds apple pies and hangin' with Bono, not a cheap-seats apology more suited to Eminem's Recovery.
The point was that T.I., like Jay-Z, can be a transcendental figure when he chooses, someone whose albums cause hip-hop to stop whatever it's doing so it can take inventory of where it currently stands. And to T.I.'s credit, he makes a few strides to get beyond a sound he basically perfected a decade ago. But he barely makes an attempt to keep up when he's trying to run with the kids: Meek Mill and A$AP Rocky have almost nothing in common stylistically, except for that they both outrap T.I. badly on their respective tracks. More worrisome is how T.I. gets lapped by his own peers. There's no shame in ceding the spotlight to Andre 3000, as he does on the phenomenal mea culpa "Sorry", but then you get the 2 Chainz-style molly & Red Bull cocktail "Ball", which answers the question of "man, how hard can that be?" with "harder than you think."
Part of the problem could be focus. The uneven and pop-oriented Paper Trail (Trouble Man's closest analog in the T.I. discography) had his biggest chart hits and even the long-forgotten No Mercy still went gold*.* Since then, T.I. authored a book, starred in a reality series, signed Iggy Azalea, curated a women’s clothing line, teased a collaboration album with B.o.B., and already promised a sequel to Trouble Man called He Who Wears the Crown. So in its own way, Trouble Man's scattershot approach makes it the realest album the guy could make in 2012, but that doesn't make it any good.
