The latter line is something of a microcosm for the record as a whole: aiming for blunt nonchalance but landing closer to crass juvenalia. Earlier on that song, 21 snarls, “If rap wasn’t working, I’d probably rob a Brinks truck.” This specificity and energy is sorely lacking across the tape as a whole. Flash back to 21’s standout feature on Lil Baby’s uneven January album WHAM, where he compared the diamonds in his watch to Hi-Chew candy and puts the bulletproof Maybach in cruise control, and it’s genuinely confusing as to why the raps on his own album are so undetailed.
Speaking of Lil Baby, their collaboration on “ATLANTA TEARS” is a clear highlight, tender and introspective. “When you thuggin’, it’s like fuck it when the judge give life sentences / Fifteen years in and I guarantee you feel different,” Baby advises over a warmly analog instrumental. 21 meets the moment with a reflective verse that lopes from island vacations to legal appeals to dirty sodas, threading together trophies and trauma alike. There’s still a boneheaded, lascivious edge to his problems (“Would you suck my dick the way you do if I was local?”), but it doesn’t overshadow the wisdom in a line like, “Thought you had to rap ’bout what you live and I got older.”
Much will also be made of “I Wish,” both for its R. Kelly sample and its litany of inverted RIPs, but it’s the album’s clear nadir, cringe for its overly broad conceit and clumsy in its execution. No matter how raw and honest his feelings may be, 21’s bars are too weak for the emotional weight he wants them to carry. “I wish Dolph would’ve Uber Eats’d them cookies instead / I wish Nipsey stayed at home with Lauren, chilled in the bed.” These sound more like middling slam poetry than the laments of a Grammy-winning rapper, and the throwaway hypotheticals undercut his allusions to more personal grief.
