For comparison's sake, New England grumpster laureate Robert Frost once summarized life with the same grey truth as veteran Houston rapper Trae titles his fourth full-length: It goes on. It's not a party. It's not a bitch. It just keeps moving.
First, for the uninitiated, the immediate: Trae's voice is a throaty bass as wide and monotone as the Texas plains, as congested as I-610 during rush hour, yet somehow agile. Think of a vaguely nihilist Twista on Xanax and Zoloft who can rap in separate gears. Think of a hearse on rims and vogues switching lanes in a vapored midnight.
People have been dying around Trae his whole life. Brought up as an MC as a part of the sprawling, multi-dozen Screwed Up Click, Trae's been losing friends and artistic partners to jail and coffins since before his 2003 solo debut. Most affecting for Trae was the 1998 murder of original S.U.C. member Fat Pat. Since then Trae, and his music, have been cast under a perpetual grief. Trae lovingly exhumed a Fat Pat verse to close his blustery, ambitious Restless, and recorded another song for the album with Pat's older brother and S.U.C. original Big H.A.W.K.
Life Goes On, Trae's fourth, is nothing if not a war with and against grief. Yeah, there are three or four abscesses in song and guest selection-- Yung Joc having the first verse on the album is near unforgivable-- but the album's core sequence holds up a classic emotional curve. He wallows in the bone yard praying to 2pac ("Against All Odds"), he's blasé on capitalism ("Nuthin' 2 A Boss"), he seeks out like-minded others ("Smile"-- with typically terrific guest verses from Styles P and Jadakiss). And, perfectly enough, at the centerpiece "Give My Last Breathe", Trae and the whole album turn. Instead of the distant, abstract gruffness and nihilism of the album's first half, Trae confesses, he mourns, and diffuses pride through grief.
Speaking directly to H.A.W.K.: "Tell the devil I'm the truth, that's why he's hiding this one out/ I feel my body had to fight to walk your casket to your grave/ No matter how it went I never thought I'd put you in your grave." Trae's deft enough to come up with a different rhyme then ending the last two lines with near verbatim phrases. It's the emphasis in repetition and the slight diction change ("put" versus "walk") that gives its resonance. Trae's not an exceptional formalist, but he's an organically savvy MC and his flourishes are subtle.
The album moves itself through woozy motions like a patient bedridden and etherized. Dark, recursive bubbles and springs of viscous Texas funk (courtesy of under-the-radar producers like Mr. Rodgers and N.O.V.A & Info) fill in the gaps around Trae's voice. He's stuck in moments he can't get out of: "Swang" from 2006's Restless reappears as the beat for "Give My Last Breathe". When Life Goes On makes that thematic turn after that track, the dramatic peaks and valleys sharpen in relief. "Gittin' High" is a slice of subversive grace-- a rainy, spring-loaded jam about how Trae still won't blaze because: "I choose to maintain, cause whether I get high or not/ My stress gon' be the same thing." It's the best, most emotionally nuanced drug refusal song in hip-hop since "So Tired" from Hi-Tek's Hi-Teknology 2.
Trae corners the market on his kind of titrated anguish. Where The Documentary wailed and pouted-- "Last year alone I spent 1.5 Mil on my niggaz!"-- Trae murmurs and coughs death wishes and solipsism ("They sent me to live my life in the rain"). He's a self-denier, putting his voice and songs through a darkness visible that's lasted almost his entire career. The work comes first. The songs must be written. The dead are honored in action.
Fantastic peaks and a genuine dark energy are tempered by those awful guest choices (Lloyd and Yung Joc most odiously), but I can't shake the feelings of Life Goes On: its got the same weary heart as Scarface, 2pac, and hell, even Joy Division. When Trae says: "I watch my surroundings/ Like they watchin' me," you know that while he's got the spirit, he's lost the feeling. Or, in other words, he's got miles to go before he sleeps.
