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I’ve been doing it since 2006, and it’s rising steadily. I could show people stuff that’d make them shake, but I don’t. Look at artists today flashing piles of money and Instragramming their goods. You identify with bosses running familial businesses who are quiet and play things close to the vest? So I did my Mob trio and ended it with “Gotti.” Now, I’m a positive guy, but I felt as if I was on my Mafia shit right now. Everything runs through me in one way or another. Now, and I say this with all humbleness, I feel like I am truly a boss.
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Before that, I had the Latin history trio.
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That’s why I believe I have a real core fan base, a support system.Įnding at “Gotti,” why have your last three albums focused on the Mafia’s most legendarily silent Dons? Why focus on the Italian mob at all? I’ve never been afraid of revealing what I’m going through, positive and negative. The message across all of my albums is: be transparent. Or the B-Real “Prohibition” collaboration, recalling my business shit coming together. Or “The White Album” (2011), remembering my mom dying of cancer, and me focusing on my daughter. I can listen to 2008’s “Drought Season,” and recall being hungry, having to survive.
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CM10: Free Game isn’t his most vital album, but he’s entitled to a victory lap.Variety spoke with Berner on the “Draped Up” single’s release day to discuss all of this, as well as an upcoming collaboration with his “neighbor,” Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, with whom he freestyled during a 2021 Wolf Bros show, performing the Dead’s “Liberty.”Īcross your 40-plus albums, is there an arc, a driving lyrical force? Yo Gotti will never do reinvention, nor should he. “I was right there with Wayne, back Carter 1/He had a Cash Money chain, shit, I wanted one.” It's a biographical detail that lays out just how many times Gotti has been around the hip-hop block. The most gripping song here is “Rap Check.” Gotti sets his voice to a dry, grainy drawl to give a revealing depiction of his earliest interactions with Cash Money Records, Jeezy, Dr. Yet that weathered, guttural rasp can also be turned to something more triumphant: see “Recession Proof,” present as a bonus track, where his stunt-to-camera boasts have the appropriate swagger. On “For The Record,” his rapping is low-rumbling and intense as he describes friends stealing his money and his baby’s mother leaving him. He’s still not the nimblest rapper in the game-at his laziest, he can sound sedate and pensive, his wheezy voice gasping for breath-but he’s evolved from a Jeezy soundalike to something more eerie. “I’d sell a brick and put blues in my pocket/Now they talking digital money and wallets,” he says, sounding like he’s talking to a friend after being pitched in his label office by 20-year-old tech bros.įortunately, Gotti doesn’t flow like an old guy. Gotti describes seeing dealers getting paid via money apps and being pulled into meetings about the metaverse. On “Crypto,” the 40-year-old sounds half intrigued, half baffled by digital currencies and other new tech (and this is the guy, by the way, who knows the benefits of a slick DM slide). Principally, Gotti can’t hide that he’s getting older.
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But it would be wrong to say that CM10: Free Game plays like a 2008 record that fell through a crack in time and landed in modern day. If the narratives are familiar, so are the beats: There are creeping, bass-heavy trap rattlers and soul loops that owe a debt to Just Blaze and early Kanye West. When he drops a line like, “Mama pray for me, help me with this anger,” in the middle of “Palm Trees in Memphis,” I want him to pull at that thread further and put more of himself in the song. It would be nice if he delved deeper, if only a little more often. But his brooding is brief, and he quickly moves to an accounting of the pleasures that make up his present opulence: Dior threads, a house that feels like a hotel, a garage comparable to a stable with “a lot of horses.” Gotti’s modus operandi is to pepper listeners with surface-level references to hustling and wealth. So you get a song like “Palm Trees in Memphis,” where Gotti recalls memories of childhood poverty over a sumptuous soul sample from producer STREETRUNNER. Gotti’s still live from the kitchen, cooking bricks over a stove, “making that pot go do the beatbox.” There’s little tension because CM10: Free Game swerves colder portraits of a dealer’s life, keeping the viewfinder firmly on the benefits.
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This suggests a duality to the two sets, but any thematic disparity is basically undetectable.
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On the artwork accompanying Side B, he’s kitted out in some of his sharpest formal wear. The cover of Side A features a topless Gotti wearing sagging pants and a clean hat and kicks. Instead, it dropped to streaming services in two halves. In old times, CM10: Free Game would simply be a double album.
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