On the first single from Reloaded, Roc Marciano threatens to "push your afro back to 76... those were some good years, baby." He was born in 1978. It's not the first time the Long Island rapper has ignored the calendar year. After spending the 2000s in the major label hinterlands as a forgotten member of Flipmode Squad, he went Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on that entire decade with the release of 2010's Marcberg. On that album, he's firmly lodged in a style of hip-hop that never escaped the mid-90s, equally informed by the pimp posture of the 70s and the crack epidemic of the 80s. He remains in that zone today, but two years later, surrounded by rugged New York rap from artists like Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Heems, El-P, and the Pro Era crew (not to mention Nas' overtly nostalgic Life is Good), he sounds like less of an anachronism. Fortunately, he's taken this new enviornment as a challenge, and Reloaded improves on Marcberg in every conceivable way.
In setting and sound, Reloaded is most certainly a "New York" album. The beats are steeped in classic blaxploitation funk and understated menace, but the occasional glimpse of light and organic groove offers more entry points than the unrelentingly grim Marcberg. And where Marcberg simply filled a void, Reloaded can create demand among rap fans who look beyond the five boroughs. Roc's voice is more confident and distinctive and, more importantly, he's stepped up his lyrics. They've become something wholly his own as opposed to a clear stylistic descendent of anyone else. He's at a point that we see every few years where a rapper manages to accumulate the escape velocity to transcend the strictures of regionalism and become something that can be embraced by anyone who simply loves the possibilities that hip-hop lyricism allows for. It's "gangsta rap" in form alone, still presented as songs with hooks and structure, but the main pursuit is making the English language bend to their will: see Prodigy in 2000, DipSet in 2003, Clipse in 2005, Wayne in 2007, Gucci Mane in 2009, or Rick Ross in 2010. Or, it's "lyrical" hip-hop for people who don't necessarily think that term has to be the tool of the "good guys."
Roc Marciano pulls pretty much one trick over and over again throughout Reloaded, but it's an awesome one-- managing to stack one multisyllabic rhyme after another in a way that still makes narrative sense, without ever devolving into empty Scribble Jam showmanship. As a result, Reloaded is 100% quotable. Marciano's first few bars on "Tek to a Mack" basically sums it up: "I'm back for the crown, baby/ In the Avi' that's brown like gravy/ Style's wavy, lazy eye Tracy McGrady/ Deliver like an 80-pound baby." "Pistolier" is another astounding example of Marciano's limitless facility with gun talk: "diamond choker, we bonded at the Ponderosa/ Islamic culture put the copper in the toaster/ Pot smoker drive the Rover with the silent motor/ Mama I'm vulgar my persona got the fly aroma." Even better is how Roc is realizing the inherent comedy in all of this absurd wordplay. Closer "The Man" is something closer to straight punchline stand-up, as Roc comes up with the best NBA namedrops in recent memory over DOOM-style soul cheese ("sniff the Chris Mullin off the envelope," "the 4-4's chrome with the long nose, call it Ginobili"). Did you enjoy any of those? Great, because the whole album is pretty much that all the time, thrilling and incredibly nerdy, like watching the best Street Fighter II player in town rule the local arcade.
Based on the above, Reloaded should be something of a minor classic. But if you still consider hip-hop to be a triangulation of beats, rhymes, and life, it's the last of the three that ultimately limits its ceiling. Quite simply, nothing happens on Reloaded. At all. That's something of an overstatement, obviously: Most of the time, Roc and his associates will plot on your demise and execute it with ease, at which point they will have their way with your woman and celebrate over top-shelf liquor. Then they'll probably buy more guns. That's the plot of nearly every single track on Reloaded. Yet none of this seems to be happening in the present tense and it's easy to imagine Roc rapping the entirety of Reloaded from a podium, like it's simply a 55-minute lecture on wordplay. There's an almost wholesale dearth of storytelling and aside from the still rather vague encomium of "Thug's Prayer, Pt. 2", not a single personal detail.
But Reloaded's narrow brand of lyrical genius is so captivating on a second-by-second basis that these criticisms feel misplaced or even irrelevant. Though his appeal runs deep, Roc Marciano is a specialist and the flipside of the consensus praise granted to universal, emotive, and ambitious hip hop records like Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is that specialists tend to get underrated or overlooked. A rapper doesn't have to be everything to everyone, especially if their strengths lie in making antisocial, verbally virtuosic beatdown hip-hop-- after all, look what happened to Mobb Deep when they started making love songs. And if you simply want a rap album that will inspire all-caps quote sprees on Twitter or hourlong Gchat exchanges with your fellow microphone fiends, it really doesn't get any better than Reloaded.
