Big Sean is the Nickelback of rap. His music is earnest but predictable; he is critically reviled but puts up No. 1 albums. There are as many people who hail his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets sketch as there are who think he’s got real bars. Earlier this year, Sean released I Decided., the follow-up to his 2015 album Dark Sky Paradise. Both albums suggested he has a bit more to offer than syntactically tangled lyrics and Dark Sky not only had hits that appealed to his detractors—the Drake-featuring “Blessings” and epic kiss-off “I Don’t Fuck With You”—but suggested that, with a little bit of growing up, he could perhaps start to chip away at his long-held place as a bottom-rung rapper. His new collaborative project with Metro Boomin, Double or Nothing, undoes all that good with lyrics so absurd it’s difficult to imagine they were written in this reality.
Why isn’t there anyone in the recording studio telling Big Sean that his lyrics are not good? He opens the album with a track called “Go Legend” where he declares his brother to be like John Legend. On “Who’s Stopping Me,” he offers us this: “I had a dream I rode with Rosa Parks in back of the ’Bach/And we was blowing a blunt and she was packing a strap/Like damn, it do feel good to be black in the back.” While it’s worth noting that Sean’s vocal cadence succeeds where his wordplay fails—he emphasizes the “do” to imply that it now feels good to be black and sitting in the back because being chauffeured is a sign of wealth—his thug fantasia about a civil rights icon is neither trenchant nor funny—just very corny.
There are more failed attempts at woke lyrical tricks throughout the album, particularly on “Savage Time” where he raps, “Beat a white supremacist black/’Till that motherfucker hate his face,” shouts out former San Francisco 49ers quarterback and leader of the “National Anthem” protest movement in the NFL Colin Kaepernick, and asserts that he’s going to take water from Flint, Michigan to Washington D.C. where he knows Donald Trump won’t drink it. These are all great things to rap about! Sean is from Detroit and the ongoing, appalling Flint water crisis is something he should be passionate out; with such a big platform, he has the ability to highlight it for pop audiences who may not be informed about the dark reality that the residents of that town have not had clean water for over three years.
His feeble attempts at political commentary are, however, less unfortunate than his characteristically gross sex raps of which there are plenty. The most vacuous are on “So Good”: “Pussy so good, I never fuck you in the ass/Got a long dick, that shit barely fit/Like O.J. glove, you must acquit”; “I be damned if I didn’t 69/I can hit this shit until I’m 69.” It is, at least, a good reminder that no matter how ironic your “nice” joke is, there has probably never been an actually funny 69 joke ever in history.
Although these gaffes are his own, the person who probably suffers the most from Double or Nothing is Metro Boomin. The 24-year-old producer has had immense success with these kinds of projects before, garnering critical acclaim for Savage Mode with 21 Savage and Droptopwop with Gucci Mane. But the difference is that 21 and Young Thug both know how to make their work with Metro more symbiotic: his production is usually a palette for a vocalist to go bold or unhinged, like Thug on “Hercules,” Future’s “I Serve the Base,” or Tinashe’s “Ride of Your Life,” among many, many others. From the quality of the production, it seems that Metro knows he wasn’t going to get a progressive performance from Sean. Most of the beats on the album are standard fare with a few gems like “Reason,” which recalls Metro’s What a Time to Be Alive production “Jumpman,” and “Who’s Stopping Me” which samples from Brazilian artist Nazaré Pereira’s “Clarão De Lua,” something a little bit different from Metro’s typically modern approach. Sean adds his approval by saying, “This shit sound like ‘Narcos’” before he starts rapping. The television series “Narcos,” of course, takes place in Colombia where they speak Spanish; “Clarão De Lua” is in Portuguese, Brazil’s native tongue. Like most of Double or Nothing, it is just another thing he gets wrong.
