French Montana has spent a decade and several record deals trying to close the gap between his flamboyant lifestyle and his boring raps. The chromatic and gaudy world he navigates IRL isn’t usually reflected inside his verses. French names exotic pets after Roman dictators and spends fortunes on luxury concept cars imported from his native Morocco to Calabasas. There are videos of Akon buying him a Maserati and a $120k basketball shootout with Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, and Meek Mill; the raps should write themselves. It’s one of contemporary rap’s biggest riddles: How can a character so fit for the Kardashian Extended Universe be the least interesting person on every high profile release he’s ever been a part of? The overstuffed and dull Excuse My French was just a microcosm of a larger problem: This guy has no vision and no imagination. He’s consistently a hanger-on—to Max B, to Diddy, to Ross, and then to Khloe—who flourishes as a premium space filler. Until recently, there hasn’t been much validating his seat at the table.
The stink of his big-budget major label debut stuck with him, but to French’s credit, he’s persisted, making himself visible when others might have vanished. In the four years between Bad Boy releases, he churned out a mixtape series that peaked with Wave Gods last February, and he was building momentum for a proper Excuse My French follow-up. MC4, a mixtape sequel turned album, was supposed to be his big comeback. But despite tracks with Drake, Kanye, and Nas, and the phenomenal Kodak Black-led “Lockjaw,” it was repeatedly delayed. French cited sample clearance issues when it was pushed back. (L.A. Reid later admitted that it was delayed simply because there wasn’t any buzz for it.) In a bizarre turn, Target shipped the album unprovoked on the original release date. MC4 soon ended up online, and was subsequently shelved before finally becoming a retail mixtape. After parting with MMG and going home to Morocco for the first time in years, French Montana returns newly motivated with his sophomore album, Jungle Rules, which acts as a funnel for everyone’s strongest qualities but his own.
Well-produced but protracted, Jungle Rules is a marvel of excess that often works in spite of French Montana, who seems content to let others do the heavy lifting. His voice is rarely the standout and is the least necessary. Many of French’s best songs find him rapping about death and overindulgence inside warped carousels fashioned out of vocals from Adele, Florence and the Machine, La Roux, Lana Del Rey, and Utada Hikaru. Jungle Rules returns to the well—on “Whiskey Eyes,” “Too Much,” and “White Dress”—but wildly mixes in trap, dancehall, and pop rap. After turning a corner on Wave Gods, his writing has regressed to hollow swaggering.
He really needs listeners to know he purchased Selena Gomez’s $3.3 million mansion in Calabasas (even though he never stays in it), which is cool even by rap standards, but all he manages to muster are Selena shoutouts and outright mentions of the buy. When the bars aren’t goofy (“And that’s why the bitches fuck with me/‘Cause a nigga flip-flop like he standin’ on the beach”) they’re sadly drab (“I pray we live/For a thousand years/And if I hurt you/Baby, drink Cîroc for your tears”). His idea of a romantic gesture is hoping aloud a woman doesn’t get famous, unable to hide his selfish ulterior motives with lazy writing. And its hypocritical coming from someone who has actively sought out famous women and whose entire identity hinges on being adjacent to celebrity.
Why aren’t there raps about his return to Morocco? Or about his bizarro album release mishap, which is unprecedented in the streaming era? Why is “Got jerked my first deal, and I told ‘em ‘Suck a dick’/Once I made my first mil’, I told them ‘Fuck a brick’” the closest he gets to unpacking his tumultuous major label journey on his comeback album? How can a 18-track album say so little? The most interesting material in his life gets misused or goes unmentioned.
That isn’t to say French is incapable of mustering up any insights about his fascinating life or giving more of himself. If Wave Gods and MC4 proved anything, it’s that he can be effective when concise, and on Jungle Rules there are flashes of that same acuity. On “Formula,” he raps, “My homie Chinx got murdered/Nobody seen, nobody heard/They left us on the corner, wanna kill us here/Now, Nino in the Carter with the Cartier/My homie Max got a hundred years/His mama body dry, can’t cry no tears.” “Too Much” condenses mass incarceration into four lines.
But there isn’t enough of that to fill the hour. French has relied heavily on guests throughout his career, and they dictate things here too, creating an uneven play-through. Swae Lee dominates “Unforgettable,” which is ironically named given French’s contributions. Sandwiching French between the Weeknd and Max B exposes how monotonous his melodies can be. He isn’t an equal for Future or Quavo or Thug or T.I., who all steal the spotlight with more memorable performances. “Formula” is a poached Alkaline song woefully repurposed. “She Workin” would be much better off as a Marc E. Bassy song. On “Bring Dem Things” he gets upstaged by both Pharrell the Rapper and a mismanaged sample of Organized Konfusion’s “Stress.”
Jungle Rules doesn’t answer any of the questions that have circled French Montana his entire career, chiefly: Can he be a leading man and can he be as interesting on wax as he is in the day to day? He has evolved quite a bit since Excuse My French, coming up with moments of sharpness, but he is still limited in what he can do. His music flattens the showy life he lives. If there’s a case to be made for his vibrance, it isn’t this.
