Rap Or Go To The League (studio album) by 2 Chainz

Pretty good album, different form most of the hip-hop albums released these period.

From benpaco 05/09/2019 21:08

This is sorta a weird album for me, because it's a look at what is clearly a pretty intimate and personal situation of 2Chainz's experiences with college basketball and life around the time he was pursuing that life potentially, but the most intimate moments are kinda glossed over or kept very vague, and most of the specifics we get are about his basketball career. On a meta level, this is actually pretty cool I think since, zooming out, the album could also be about the stereotypical choices given to impoverished black teenagers, the concept that your only choices to escape poverty would be to either make it as a rapper or as a sports star (to Rap or Go To The League). These more vague moments sorta make more sense through that lens - I don't think we ever find out what he's actually referring to on the hook of "Momma I Hit A Lick", just that he did something and wants his mom to know. Is this guilt? Does he need help? We might not know because it might not be 2Chainz's story himself, this might be a fictional character who goes through some of what he goes through, it might be a general character trying to show the struggles of escaping poverty, I just don't know.

Thematically, that leaves the album in a simultaneously interesting and somewhat confusing place for me. The repeated references to college basketball ("Leveled up past Fab Five", all of NCAA, etc) seem to clearly reflect 2Chainz's personal experience as an NCAA basketball player, but other moments seem to be from other characters. This all culminates in a very odd way - a chill, anti-taxation slow jam. It's oddly tone deaf in some ways after an album about trying to find other escapes than rap or sports for impoverished youth to then say "I don't wanna pay taxes". It's possible that he's trying to say that the taxes aren't currently being used to help those who need it - "What are taxes for?" comes up - but it's surrounded by 2Chainz's boasting of how much money he's made, which doesn't help that come across. If you're trying to theme it, you could potentially try to tie it to the fact that he was charged tuition to play basketball without being paid (at least I think - he talks about struggling to get a scholarship throughout), so now being expected to work and still have to pay back being sort of an allegory for that, but that's a big old stretch and I don't really love that message regardless.

Overall, it's really close to being really great, and there's just a few songs that really miss me or feel like they really fall out of the mood and story that the first half of the album sets up, but there's a number of tunes here that I'll be revisiting a lot, especially Momma.

Tauheed's Epps aka 2 Chainz's fifth album opens with the excerpt of his coming into play for the North Clayton Eagles twenty-four years ago. From the first seconds, this new project takes a very personal and autobiographical turn, an approach confirmed by the first two tracks - "Forgiven" and "Threat 2 Society" - on which 2 Chainz tells a tumultuous adolescence: he tells his devouring passion for hip hop, his basketball talent, his daily rhythm punctuated by drug trafficking. Very clearly, the years showed us that 2 Chainz did not need anyone to shine, and very clearly the project could have done without all these empty and pretty bad featurings (Kendrick, Chance The Rapper, Lil Wayne, Ty Dolla $ign). But 2 Chainz shows us that getting older in rap is possible, and that's probably the most important thing about "Rap Or Go To The League".

6/10

Very good album from 2 Chainz. He shows us that he can do trap bangers, as usual, but there are also some very good introspective tracks here.