When he appeared three years ago on Cam'ron's "Hey Ma", Juelz Santana actually sounded older than he does today, stretching his naturally spiky voice to fit the reclining, piano-driven beat. Copping good "dome" his club night ne plus ultra, Santana's fledgling audacity shone clear: "I'm 18 and live a crazy life" hardly prohibited "Get in the car/ Don't touch nothin', sit in the car."
I guess you could say he's grown: What the Game's Been Missing! woos dope boys, not fastidious females. Ask Young Jeezy, such is the fashion. Santana talks coke with a sentimental drift. On "Rumble Young Man Rumble", it's toast-worthy ("To the good days, to the bad days/ To the good yay', to the bad yay'"); on "Oh Yes", lamentable ("I'm back/ I'm crack/ Sorry 'bout that"). Nowhere on this trap-happy album is Santana's pocket full of stones more pivotal than in "Lil' Boy Fresh", which details a S\xFBze-esque set-up ("You should've seen the look on Jose's face"), nowhere soupier than in the otherwise squeaky-clean "Good Times": "Those were the good ol' days/ Every hustler had good cocaine."
Jeezy invokes community in his pusher raps-- no matter how hard, a hustler is never above helping his hood. But Santana is so heels-over-head smitten with his product, one wonders if people even factor on his radar. He embodies coke: A daisychain of wildly entertaining summer mixtapes wore the rapper's audacious moniker, Human Crack in the Flesh. The series yielded a number of underground hits, including "Mic Check" and "There It Go (The Whistle Song)".
Both here and on his mixtapes, Santana delivers simple phrases with enough oomph to break a dinosaur rib cage. He's a master minimalist who can take a single word and make a song of it. Few MCs say more with so little, and Santana compensates for what he lacks of Cam's 3D-goggled imagism or Jeezy's raze-the-block charisma with a knotty, nunchucking delivery style that's half flow, half helicopter.
Santana's staccato spit makes ideal rhythm-play. Beats aren't foundations but running ropes, designed to test agility. On "Oh Yes" he jukes the Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman", recalling a young Cam's snappy "Oh Boy". Although he was weaned on the Dipset aesthetic, which favors cutting strings and tamped-down drums, Santana excels at navigating the vacuous spaces in starkly unadorned beats. Time and time again, he fashions a soft spot in inflexible bedrock. On "Clockwork" he creeps over hollowed-out string trill and noisome synth fuzz, working the titular metaphor into pretty much every line. Lyrically staid next to Cam's fantastical scrolls, Juelz dazzles by dint of sound. He rhymes words with themselves ("Whatever U Wanna Call It" simply keeps "business, business/ pleasure, pleasure," and never mixes the two, "ever, ever"), beats cadences to a pulp like the Ying Yang Twins' favorite topic, and truncates lines as if he's ducking the oncoming kicks.
When Sensitive Juelz proclaims his shit "the realest I ever wrote" on token lament-to-self "This Is Me", you'll sashay next door to "Make It Work For You"'s crumbling corner real estate, much truer; when Hell Rell grumbles over roto-toms and drear piano twinkle on "Whatever U Wanna Call It", you'll commend Santana for flying solo on heat like "Gangsta Shit" ("Hi, my name is / Deeeeez nuts!"). But the holes are more Alpine Lace than Emmentaler. Barely 21, Santana might as well have his head in the font, and he conserves words as if poised for a long race.
