No upside. Skills won't translate to the "next level." Gimmicky. If he's on the wrong team, he'll be exposed as a limited talent who's been coddled by swagger-hating purists. Wale loves himself some NBA namedrops, so even as The Mixtape About Nothing stands as one of 2008's best rap albums, it can't sit well with him that his detractors talk about him as if he were college star/NBA rookie Tyler Hansborough. Especially since he closes out Back to the Feature by coincidentally comparing himself to Psycho T's new teammate, the far more physically dominant scoring machine Danny Granger.
So it's understandable that he's gotten a little defensive on Back to the Feature, if not a little worrying-- Nothing's biggest risk wasn't its sampling of Seinfeld, but the spots where he threatened to get too caught up in the navel-focused minutiae of being an up-and-coming rapper (answering MySpace requests, Soundscan numbers, etc.). Despite Feature's motivation ("we just wanna let these broads know, [we] be rappin'"), the secondary theme is constraint-- being boxed into the same old comparisons (Lupe, Lil' Wayne) and the fishbowl effect of internet tastemaking, where the ability of haters to bring him down far exceeds his ability to rise above it. "Think Barack got it bad, try being a rapper" goes a particularly overreaching line, and if Wale isn't exactly gunning down his detractors, he's at least trying to let them in to more than just his shoe closet (though he still boasts about having property in Beaverton and "Phil knight talking about, 'How you got them?'").
You might not think that was the case judging from the features-- Talib Kweli, Royce Da 5'9", Joe Budden, Skyzoo, Joell Ortiz. Basically, if you've heard someone recently complain about how post-Kanye and/or southern trends have ruined hip-hop, those are the guys they're probably saying you need to listen to instead. True or not, it's hard to overlook the fact that all of these guys are super talents, and in terms of pure quotables, Feature has few peers this year. The feature-heavy lineup can detract from Wale being able to display his personality, a sort of Everyman that skirts the usual blue-collar connotations of that word to embody the sort of person for whom constant immersion in ESPN.com results in pop culture references finding themselves infecting every part of their life-- from relationship dust-ups ("I wouldn't fuck another girl out in the club/ I was Rodney Stuckey, wasn't giving my number up,"), to dealing with overzealous fans ("They be hawkin'/ I call them hoes Josh Smith") to just general shit-talk ("new MJ's hurting their eyes like Amare," "you ain't doin' shit til you put…uh…10 g's on fantasy football"). I could listen to him go off on that all day.
But the idea of Wale being only as good as his team takes on added weight in terms of the production-- though he boasts that 9th Wonder is a legend with all kinds of beats, here he's more content to ladle out bowls of turn-of-the-decade comfort food that envision a dystopia where Little Brother's The Minstrel Show actually guided the course of hip-hop. It's most certainly a gimmick move to rap over Peter Bjorn and John's "Nothing to Worry About", but also kind of a relief to hear Wale on a beat where the drums don't sound like they're stuffed with down comforters.
Not surprisingly, the most exciting stuff here comes when just about anyone other than 9th is behind the boards-- "Um Ricka" features unsurprisingly horn-heavy production from Mark Ronson, but more surprisingly is how K'Naan can do an obvious "hey, you think you can rap about Africa?" verse and not sound like he's done it dozens of times already. Even better is Ronson's grimy, Premiere-evoking "Pot of Gold" as well as the surprisingly underutilized Best Kept Secret, who expertly handles the waterworks on the closing "New Soul". Plus if Wale's DMV thing ever falls through, I'd hope he'd consider relocating to Philadelphia to become a permanent member of State Property-- "Cyphr" and "Hot Shyt", as their titles indicate, are little more than a bunch of guys rapping their asses off over minimally dressed bangers, and few do it better than Black Thought, Freeway, Peedi Crakk, and here even Young Chris.
Back to the Feature certainly stands as a worthy follow-up to The Mixtape About Nothing, but I can't help but think of it in the terms of how 2007's most unorthodox commercial success story (the "Radiohead model") bears such [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| similarity to 2008's (the "Lil' Wayne model")-- the fact that they're considered "models" instead of a strange commingling of irreplicable circumstances has hurt way more artists than it helped, especially those without a decade's worth of goodwill. With Wale and hip-hop in general, it feels even more pronounced: "They used to call me the future/ A month later, say "fuck it-- I've grown used to him'." It's not an easy situation to be in, to have fans who bitch about how rappers aren't making classic albums anymore, but expect nearly constant production from the new guys. But as Asher Roth and Charles Hamilton and such have ultimately proven, it's not like those people are really the fans worth staking your career on. If tapes like Back to the Feature are what we can expect from Wale should this whole "ft. Lady Gaga" thing not work out, that's fine, but instead of shouting out his classmates in the XXL Freshman 10, he might want to put up his Nike Boots for a minute and learn from their mistakes.
