The release of Styles P's latest album, Super Gangster (Extraordinary Gentleman), was practically a holiday miracle. It was barely 12 months ago that his sophomore album, Time Is Money, thudded into record stores hungover on a three-year delay with nary a peep or stapled poster from Interscope. To absolutely no one's surprise, it came and went and faded.
The difference between Time Is Money and the burly Super Gangster, the spiritual successor to 2002's underrated A Gangster and a Gentleman: Would you believe...Koch Records? Taking about twice as much money per CD (hook no. 1 of the Koch business model) and working in a famously speedy, hands-off label (no. 2), Styles not only puts out a better album than before, but in roughly one-third the time, and one that maximizes his strengths, drywalls up his holes, and keeps it moving through a one-stop front end, a soggy middle and (thankfully) a clubberin' final third.
Sins first: Swizz Beatz convincing himself he's Pharrell on the otherwise blissy keyboard starbursts of "Blow Your Mind". Ray J trying to forge a career outside Kim Kardashian's genitals and "Moeisha". Using part of the budget to spring Dipset cabana boy Max B. from the clink. Composing "Look at Her" and "Green Piece of Paper" with the same love of foggy keyboard and schlock from the 80s teen film prom bands.
Even with those messes it's hard to penalize Styles directly. The worst elements of the album are the hooks and rote guest appearances; Styles' verses are structurally sound, show durable movement, and are warm in his voice-- a sharp, baritone a quintessentially soft New York accent that's as much a part of the Dutch English legacy as Kool Moe Dee's. With the right combination of subject or guest, he takes off on the worn in gangster-as-Sufi-warrior-poet tropes. He goes toe-to-toe with Ghostface in the penalty box ("Star of the State") and escapes with smiles and bruises. When he tries too hard on stoner ode "Blow Your Mind" he spins slop imagism-- "I'm good, the sky couldn't be a deeper blue/ Sun lookin' like a tangerine"-- but listen midline and he gets in unconsciously smooth mini-sequences ("mind blown, time flies, time flown").
Styles P is one of the few guys who genuinely sounds comfortable in crossing over from specific, constant gun talk to genuine conscious rhetoric-- here trading 1960s Civil Rights Movement images with Black Thought on "Cause I'm Black". It's kind of a shame that Super Gangster doesn't have more of Styles feeling unwound and intellectual. The album's final quarter has both feet in that muddled territory, and the best possible Styles album would be another 30 minutes of this stuff.
Super Gangster might be duller, too, because of just how delightfully common Styles P's recent career arc is becoming. The retracting rap market has produced a safe enough estuary of established national rappers-- at least half a decade of LPs, most cases more-- and the willingness to make their own album outside the golden handcuffs (Project Pat, Prodigy, Little Brother) or succeed under tempered label expectations, earned fan base, and a market vacuum (UGK, Beanie Siegel, Freeway). Don't look now hip-hop, the underground is getting overcrowded.
