Baton Rouge's Trill Entertainment clearly has their heroes-- UGK, Trick Daddy, Scarface-- but more important than that, they've got models: business models. In an age where a respected Def Jam lieutenant (that'd be Freeway) can barely lift a glossy, sturdy soul-rap album past 100,000 units, Trill's Standard Oil/Cash Money/Apple vertical integration has let Lil' Boosie, Webbie, and the label's comparatively forgettable posse albums routinely flirt with gold plaques. They keep their shows rowdy, packed, and staged in B-list cities and backwater towns no one at Clear Channel could find with a GPS. They keep their producers in-house and overworked. They could give a collective fuck when it comes to courting HOT 97 and MTV. Sound familiar?
Call it Cash Money-lite. Producers Mouse and BJ understudy Mannie Fresh with Delta bass-bounce and zydeco flourishes. Lil' Boosie, though he's been rapping for as long as anyone in Cash Money, still scans like a mid-shelf Lil Wayne: a temperamental, ecstatic, vowel-chain loving whelp. Executive producers Turk & Mel are as invisible as Baby's silent partner and brother, Cash Money co-owner Slim Williams.
Webbie's role is a bit harder to cast. Since his first appearances for Trill he's been paired with Boosie. Their duo album, 2005's Gangsta Muzik, collaborations across Webbie's debut Savage Life and Boosie's Bad Azz, and their obvious leadership roles on Trill's label album Survival of The Fittest pegged him as the Juvenile to Boosie's Wayne. Webbie plods where Boosie yelps; he extends his drawl where Boosie snips his lines into chain-link patterns; he wrestles with adulthood while Boosie plays Peter Pan.
Fitting for an album that documents a perhaps unwilling crawl to maturity, Savage Life 2 succeeds when it sticks to the specific, discrete, and (relatively) adult. Webbie certainly sounds like he's done some growing up since his debut. It shows on "Independent", the album's lead single and one of the year's most refreshing jams. Webbie dishes out acclaim for his vision of full-fledged women-- "She ain't waitin' for no man to take care of her/ She'd rather go to work and pay the bills on schedule"-- on a barking, two-tone bubble beat. He provides the steady drawl, newcomer Lil' Phat bricks a few lines ("She cook/ She clean/ She smell like onion ring"-- whatever works, brah) and Boosie steals away the final verse in a whorl of giddy shrieks. Nothing revelatory, nothing too illuminating, just lovely, reasonable olive branches served for a post-Imus rap world.
Webbie finally has a wheelhouse. Like Trick Daddy he tells you not only what he has, but why, honestly, he values it. "Your shit is the cheapest, you might blow out your speakers/ Sound we blowin' and all, got warrants and all, done look down at the phone, I done missed a few calls/ Me and Boosie was thuggin', he was telling me something but I couldn't much hear." Sound systems are just that, but at least he's at least made his material concerns immersive and earnest. Webbie, like it or not, evolves. Better still, Webbie has earned a sense of monologue. "Just Like Me" is a caustic, direct speech by a father to his son, peppered with asides ("Hell yeah I'm a good dad/ But I don't know if that's good or bad") and doubt: "You gonna end up dead/ You gonna be just like me/ They gonna bust your head/ You gonna be just like me." And paternal concern: "All I can say is be safe."
But there's no hiding how much of a drop off the second-half of Savage Life 2 from the first. Webbie regresses and slides into the sloppy themes of self, self, and fantastic self. He's "Too big to forget/ Too slippery to hold." He's makin' money, you aren't. He's gonna hit it on the first night; you, of course, are not. Adulthood has its moments of regression; Webbie stumbles on more than a few on Savage Life 2, but at least there's a sense of forward momentum. When the whole rap world seems to be playing Chicken Little, at least there's a corner of this art that's climbing the ladder to maturity, undisturbed by the commercial world knocking on its door.
