Yo Gotti has been rapping reliably about selling drugs in Memphis since at least George W. Bush’s first inauguration. He’s an old-line model gangster rapper, wedded to language and sounds codified in the 2000s, maintaining high levels of street cred without ever fully breaking from those lingering Jeezy comparisons. CM10: Free Game, the tenth edition of his long-running Cocaine Muzik series, is short on innovation, but as a concentrated dose of the Yo Gotti formula, it finds a main vein.
In old times, CM10: Free Game would simply be a double album. Instead, it dropped to streaming services in two halves. The cover of Side A features a topless Gotti wearing sagging pants and a clean hat and kicks. On the artwork accompanying Side B, he’s kitted out in some of his sharpest formal wear. This suggests a duality to the two sets, but any thematic disparity is basically undetectable. Gotti’s still live from the kitchen, cooking bricks over a stove, “making that pot go do the beatbox.” There’s little tension because CM10: Free Game swerves colder portraits of a dealer’s life, keeping the viewfinder firmly on the benefits.
So you get a song like “Palm Trees in Memphis,” where Gotti recalls memories of childhood poverty over a sumptuous soul sample from producer STREETRUNNER. But his brooding is brief, and he quickly moves to an accounting of the pleasures that make up his present opulence: Dior threads, a house that feels like a hotel, a garage comparable to a stable with “a lot of horses.” Gotti’s modus operandi is to pepper listeners with surface-level references to hustling and wealth. It would be nice if he delved deeper, if only a little more often. When he drops a line like, “Mama pray for me, help me with this anger,” in the middle of “Palm Trees in Memphis,” I want him to pull at that thread further and put more of himself in the song.
If the narratives are familiar, so are the beats: There are creeping, bass-heavy trap rattlers and soul loops that owe a debt to Just Blaze and early Kanye West. But it would be wrong to say that CM10: Free Game plays like a 2008 record that fell through a crack in time and landed in modern day. Principally, Gotti can’t hide that he’s getting older. On “Crypto,” the 40-year-old sounds half intrigued, half baffled by digital currencies and other new tech (and this is the guy, by the way, who knows the benefits of a slick DM slide). Gotti describes seeing dealers getting paid via money apps and being pulled into meetings about the metaverse. “I’d sell a brick and put blues in my pocket/Now they talking digital money and wallets,” he says, sounding like he’s talking to a friend after being pitched in his label office by 20-year-old tech bros.
Fortunately, Gotti doesn’t flow like an old guy. He’s still not the nimblest rapper in the game—at his laziest, he can sound sedate and pensive, his wheezy voice gasping for breath—but he’s evolved from a Jeezy soundalike to something more eerie. On “For The Record,” his rapping is low-rumbling and intense as he describes friends stealing his money and his baby’s mother leaving him. Yet that weathered, guttural rasp can also be turned to something more triumphant: see “Recession Proof,” present as a bonus track, where his stunt-to-camera boasts have the appropriate swagger.
The most gripping song here is “Rap Check.” Gotti sets his voice to a dry, grainy drawl to give a revealing depiction of his earliest interactions with Cash Money Records, Jeezy, Dr. Dre, and others. “I was right there with Wayne, back Carter 1/He had a Cash Money chain, shit, I wanted one.” It's a biographical detail that lays out just how many times Gotti has been around the hip-hop block. Yet he’s still here. Yo Gotti will never do reinvention, nor should he. CM10: Free Game isn’t his most vital album, but he’s entitled to a victory lap.
