The pop charts have been a dangerous place for much of the past two decades. When N.W.A’s Efil4zaggin hit number one on the Billboard 200 in 1991, it established gangsta rap as a viable commercial product—and in the music’s majority white and middle-class audience, it ignited a seemingly insatiable appetite for vivid lyrical portrayals of black men working in the violence-wracked crack trade. “Gangsta” soon became hip-hop’s default pose as far as mainstream culture was concerned, and the charts were full of men with reputed gang connections and allegedly itchy trigger fingers.
Freddie Gibbs, a native of Gary, Indiana, who now lives in Los Angeles, has released ten mixtapes since 2004, and his first “official” full-length, last month’s ESGN, is aimed directly at that same mixtape audience. When Gibbs signed a production deal with Interscope in 2007 (only to be dropped the same year), he was considerably more gangsta than the average rapper. Judging by the material from his brief major-label stint that later turned up on mixtapes, he was completely uninterested in projecting a radio-friendly image—in fact the only thing he really seemed to want to get across was an unflinching reflection of the blighted streets of Gary. He prefers brutally sparse, punishingly hard beats, and he has the on-mike presence of a guard dog straining at its chain.
With gangsta rap so out of fashion it seems unlikely that ESGN is going to attract many listeners, which is a shame. There are moments on the album that make it feel like his only real competition is rap’s superelite—the ones currently spending more time talking about their modern-art collections than their street cred. In a thoroughly ironic reversal, it’s gangsta rap that’s now confined to the underground, while rappers big-upping Basquiat and criticizing America’s for-profit prison system hog the pop charts.