The appreciation of Madlib and Freddie Gibbs' new collaboration Piñata depends on the range of your hip-hop tastes and your familiarity with both artists' deep cuts. Madlib's Remixes albums put his beats in a street-rap context, giving his esoteric, dusty-sample imprint to cuts like Kurupt's "Who Ride Wit Us" and the Noreaga verse on "Misery Loves Company". And while Gibbs has thrived when his voice cuts through updated G-funk or soul-chromed Southern bounce, he's also sounded at home on the boom-bap-leaning East Coast beats of Statik Selektah (Lord Giveth, Lord Taketh Away) and the more blunted second half of Baby Face Killa. The team unofficially known as MadGibbs is a somewhat unexpected pairing, maybe a bit outside the usual, but the notion of Gibbs spitting over Madlib's dank obscuro-soul breaks became easier to understand before Piñata even came out.
The question, then, isn't whether Gibbs and Madlib make a compatible match, but what that match winds up motivating Gibbs to say. Piñata isn't a major lyrical departure from the last-real-gangsta-standing attitude that's kept Gibbs defiantly his own unfiltered self over the last five years. But his tendency to let the beat inspire certain facets of his writing has resulted in a record that, true to the underheard yet memory-stirring undercurrents of Madlib's production source material, is fueled by a certain kind of grown-man reflection. There's a deep awareness of how the embattled dealer from Gary has and hasn't changed on the way to becoming an L.A.-based enthusiast's favorite—renowned enough to get Scarface and Raekwon on his record, but for reasons that run deeper than just having famous co-signs. Many of Gibbs' lyrics on Piñata ride a line between pride in his own resilient hustle and ambivalence about what he did to succeed—maybe not guilt, but at least a concerted effort to confront his colder impulses. His stories of a talented man making his way in a bleak environment are brought up without either glamorization or moralizing, but they still feel human. Funk-fusion and soul jazz breaks bubble and blister in the heat, throbbing like a running man's pulse, and Gibbs states the facts as he sees them.
Gibbs is nothing if not an anti-bullshit activist, even if it means casting the occasional doubt upon himself or staring down his own contradictions. There's a great line on "Deeper" where he abruptly gets introspective after he confronts a woman who got pregnant by another man while Gibbs was in jail—"Maybe you's a stank ho, maybe that's a bit mean/ Maybe you grew up and I'm still livin' like I'm sixteen"—and a taut verse on "Broken" that address the supposed irony of having a cop for a father ("I'm a crook and you crooked, that's all we had in common"). Those are just a couple highlights; so many of Piñata's best moments are fueled by this sense that Gibbs knows he did wrong but also knows that letting any remorse slip would've potentially made him look weak. There's also a bit of triumph in there somewhere, not in the fact of what he's done and seen, but in the basic fact of his still being around to relay these things. This is a record that sounds really lived-in, in both the sense that it's been steadily labored over and the sense that it's focused on the personal details that come with years of weighted memories.
There are other cuts that focus more on the man Gibbs is now than the situation that made him, and they don't lack for urgency, either. "Real" is Gibbs' Young Jeezy dis track, which stands out as razor's-edge wrath in a hip-hop world that mostly sticks to subtweeting and passive-aggressive maneuvers; that it's based in actual creative grievances and personal fallout instead of just hearsay and general disrespect only makes the lacerations deeper. Paired together, "Lakers" and "Knicks" draws a straight line from his current pilgrimage-paying L.A. transplant status back to the early-days nickel-bag hustle that first proved his motivation. Even when he's doing a smoker's anthem—the blissed-out "High," featuring a characteristically hyperactive Danny Brown—there's an efficiently punchy energy that makes him sound ready to take on all comers. It's the same kind of energy that puts him on the same level as Chef ("Bomb") and Mr. Scarface ("Broken") when it comes to vivid crime-life narrative, lets him play virtuoso shit-talk mentor to Domo Genesis and Earl Sweatshirt ("Robes"), and has him leave such a dominant impression that it makes the otherwise-solid title-track closer seem like a mood-breaking outlier simply because it goes too many bars without his voice.
The way Gibbs uses that voice in the context of the production that deserves special attention here. Gibbs' acknowledged debt to 2Pac is paid back with a versatile, musical flow that seeps into and builds up the structure of the Madlib beats beneath it; his tendency to use the same intonation for both intricately tight-knit verses and simple, to-the-point hooks highlights just how skilled he is at both. He went in and challenged himself to rap fluidly over under-quantized drums and succeeds to the point where it feels like he snaps them into place himself. And that'd be noteworthy enough if this didn't double as some of Madlib's most inspired production since his Beat Konducta 00s—with Gibbs' deep resonance sinking into spaced-out synth-prog ("Bomb"; "Uno"), air-suspension glide R&B ("Robes"; "Shame"), and butterfly-knife-wielding splatter-flick funk ("Scarface"; "Real"). He even gets in the spirit of the comedic interstitial skits that're Madlib's stock in trade; while the blaxploitation dialogue and trailer snippets are fitting enough (and add some faded film-grain quality to the proceedings), the goofy kazoo-synth tag at the end of "Robes" where Gibbs mutters barbs aimed at industry-dependent fools is its own justification for the teamup on just about every level. It doesn't matter if Gibbs and Madlib were once considered artists playing to different audiences -- united in their uncompromising, independent-as-fuck visions, they put together something hardcore hip-hop heads on both sides should feel.
