Big Sean and Kanye West are here mostly in spirit, crashing the party with unforgivably clunking punch-ins like “Spanish chick-J. “Castro” is a star-studded blunder that packages some of the mixtape’s best and worst rapping hand-in-hand. Gotti has taken a mixtape-like approach to sharing space with his featured emcees, but he’s nearly overstocked the tracklist’s obvious centerpiece.
Kodak Black is the exception that steals the show on “Weatherman,” hawking a fresh-out-of-jail hook about coming up and needing more, ad-libbing it all in his stylish whine. Sometimes Gotti turns in a better chorus himself than the mixtape’s guests designated for the job. “If I knew talkin’ to you was my last time/The other night, it wouldn’t have been about no CM9,” Gotti promises. Gotti narrates as much as he raps, thanking an old friend for an overdue come-up they’ll never see through together. But the tease-“All I heard is ‘blah blah blah blah blah’”-spills throughout the song with enough charisma to worm into your ear like a bully’s “neener neener.” On the last track, Gotti endears instead, dropping his guard to memorialize his former manager, Mel Carter, who passed away less than a month before this mixtape was released. He sounds utterly unlikeable through it all. On “Blah Blah Blah” Gotti casts himself as a petty asshole over an eerie banger, taunting an ex while turning his attention elsewhere. Tracks like “Off da Top (3am)” don’t fare as well, and scan instead like generically manufactured trap.
“Biggest year of my career and I could feel the pressure, gotta follow-up,” he snips on “81,” a slapper of an intro and fine microcosm of Gotti’s honed simplicity. He isn’t known for clever lyricism, but Gotti can make a straightforward phrase sound agile. This new project’s bookends are the most explicitly self-referential of the rapper’s big 2016, and he grapples aloud with his come up. The Art of Hustle, Gotti’s last album, saw him overextended, trying to frame himself in with a single statement-worthy piece of work *CM9 *instead is a snapshot of Gotti in stride. To be sure, Gotti has a better track record as a mixtape slinger than he does as a major-label rap album artist, and *CM9 *benefits from a low-stakes formula that’s less concerned with stringing together a narrative than it is with song-by-song quality control.
Yo gotti albums down in the dm series#
Gotti’s latest seems to be billed as an album first, White Friday, and mixtape second, CM9, but he’s clearly folding his long-running *Cocaine Muzik *mixtape series into a newfound industry prominence, serving up his usual street fare with a bit more polish.
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