Leslie Pridgen, the Philadelphia rapper better known as Freeway, cannot suck. It is categorically impossible. The man with the broken-glass screech will always have a spot in our ears, if only for his inextinguishable white-hot ferocity. Life-or-death urgency is Freeway's stock in trade: he hurls every word at you like a man who's just arrived on foot from a murder scene. Anyone who treats his craft this deadly seriously cannot and will never truly suck, ever.
However, ever since detaching for good from the Roc-A-Fella roster, Freeway has been slamming up against a different wall: Steadily diminishing returns. He's been a free-spraying firehouse in search of a burning building, a town crier with no square. His talent is the kind that needs traction and guidance to reach any sort of target, and while Free has admirably maintained his intensity and productivity through shifting, uncertain years, it's hard not to feel that the context around him has slowly leaked away. Under Jay-Z's wing, as a studio instrument wielded by Just Blaze, Freeway was unstoppable, a force of nature. On Diamond in the Ruff, he sounds more than ever like he’s the ultimate good soldier, one desperately in need of a general.
Freeway sounds good here. He always sounds good. His feel for tension is unparalleled. He's internalized Pac's ability to make every verse feel like a hail of body blows, switching up his flows constantly and pouncing hard on syllables you can never anticipate. He has picked a sterling row of soul-rap instrumentals to rap over. But all of this praise doubles as diagnosis; nothing has changed in Free's attack for years, and it's starting to lose its impact. Deja-vu is setting in: "Dream Big" is a tepidly jazzy reworking of "Still Got Love", which would be bad enough, but album closer "Lil' Mama" is built on a near-identical loop. "Greatness" feels suspiciously close to "Throw Your Hands Up" from The Stimulus Package. He's repeating himself, and more blatantly than usual.
There are a few moments here that reach outside of Free's well-worn soul-rap groove. One is "Wonder Tape", which suggests an indie-rap recasting of the smeary-headlight melancholy of "I'm on One". There's "No Doubt", which strands a single hiccuping vocal sample over a cavern of empty space. And there’s "True", which feels closer to trance-rap than anything Free's done since "Lights Get Low", his duet with pre-greatness Rick Ross. They are the brightest spots on the album by virtue of suggesting there might still be unexplored stylistic avenues for Freeway.
More upsetting, there are lyrics issues as well. Free's always been a cadence-first, words-later rapper; even his most immortal lines are more memorable for their delivery than what they contain. But on Diamond, his rhyme patterns mangle his sense so often it grows distracting: "Even the Grim Reaper is only job doing," he growls on "Right Back". "Flow raw as vagina with penis entering," he says on "The Thirst". That second lyric points to a second distressing problem-- an abundance of corny, half-baked lines, like "I'm the last Flow bender like Ang" ("All the Hoods"); "Vegetarian, I go in with the lettuce" ("Money is My Medicine"); or "She just played karaoke on my pokey" ("Early"), which just felt so embarrassing to type that I simply cannot imagine how it feels to shout it.
Ever adapable, Freeway has been positioning himself, post-major label fallout as a "real hip-hop," reliable alternative to the mainstream kind of guy. It makes sense as a career move, but Diamond sees him growing a little too comfortable in his out-of-time role: On "Sweet Temptations" he makes fun of rappers with "tight slacks" and ponders "buy[ing] a plane ticket to Africa" and moving back. On "Right Back", he drops the Abe Simpson-worthy "Fab say he the best that ever twitted/ Well, I'm the hottest spitter that ever Googled," which is doubly unforgivable for not even knowing how to pronounce the word "tweet." None of this stuff is deal-breaking on its own. Freeway is still nowhere near close to sucking. But he's well on his way to not mattering.
