T.I. - Paper Trail

Two years ago, T.I. dropped “King,” a swaggering, snarling triumph of an album that truly lived up to its title. It was the Southern rapper’s best record yet, a brash, hedonistic, and surprisingly menacing celebration of all things gangsta. It also happened to be one of the best rap albums of this decade, full stop.

All this meant it was a pretty hard act to follow. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how far the rapper would fall, and how quickly. Last year, not only was he convicted to a year in jail and 1,000 hours of community service for gun possession, he also released one of the weakest albums of his career, the bland and bloated “T.I. Vs. T.I.P.” Now, for being the first concept album about schizophrenia in the history of hip hop, I’ll give him some brownie points. But just because the album had a fancy theme about reconciling his split personality – the aggressive street hustler on the one hand, and the suave ladies’ man on the other – didn’t stop it from being a padded, half-arsed follow up to the lean, sinewy brilliance of “King.”

And yet, as disappointing as “T.I. Vs. T.I.P.” was, it’s nowhere near as bad as the rapper’s latest album, “Paper Trail.” Like its predecessor, “Paper Trail” also has schizophrenia as its theme, but it chronicles something much more disturbing: the tooth-and-nail fight between T.I. the hardcore Southern emcee, and T.I. the fluffy pop-rap sell-out. It’s a conflict that tears the album apart, and leaves a big question mark over the future of the rapper’s career. On one side, we have the T.I. we know and love: magnetic, caramel drawl, rhythmically inventive delivery, witty lyrics and thuggish aggression. On the other side, and sadly, easily winning the battle on “Paper Trail,” is T.I. the pop sell-out, jumping into bed with every mainstream singer there is. Rihanna! Justin Timberlake! Kanye! Usher! Yay!

If you feel like you haven’t heard enough of Rihanna or JT this year – in which case you’ve probably been living in a sound-proof box somewhere on Mars – then “Paper Trail” is going to be exactly your kind of thing. It stands as a good sum of contemporary pop music, which, in my view at least, is one big fat orgy. Sure, people have always said “all pop sounds the same,” but that phrase has never rung truer than it does today, because all pop quite literally is the same. Look at the charts, and you see the same producers, the same singers, even the same samples, drum machines and synthesizers. It’s what I call the “Timbaland effect,” and it’s crushing pop music’s inventiveness, steam-rolling over everything in sight, from rock to R&B to rap.

And yet, I’ve never heard any album that sounds quite as anonymous as “Paper Trail.” Closer “Dead and Gone,” a Timba-bland attempt at an anthem with a whiny Justin Timberlake chorus, is a lazy carbon copy of Madonna’s “Four Minutes”; “Whatever You Like” with its bleeping, robot synths and sluggish auto-tune singing, sounds exactly like Lil’ Wayne’s “Lollipop”; and the list goes on endlessly, from the monotonous horn-filled “Swing Ya Rag,” which sounds like a parody of bad southern rap, to the Usher-led “My Life Your Entertainment,” which aims for Lupe Fiasco’s “Superstar” but sounds more like a commercial for “Us Weekly.” Still, nothing on the album can prepare you for the mind-blowing, life-changing awfulness of second single “Live Your Life.” It’s a song so bad – or, to be accurate, so baffling – that I have to set up a bit of context before I talk about it.

Two years ago, T.I. wouldn’t be caught dead with a mainstream rapper, let alone a mainstream singer. “King” and every album before it was defined by T.I.’s stubborn refusal to sell out, usually rapping choruses himself and more often than not filling his guest-list with the crème de la crème of Southern emcees. Fast forward now to 2008 and “Live Your Life” – and try to picture the shock and uncontrollable horror I felt when the song opened with a sample from Romanian pop song “Mayehi, Mayeha.” Yes, that’s right! And that’s not all, the sample is repeated again and again, with Rihanna singing a skewed cover version at the same time. Except instead of “Mayehi, Mayeha” it’s “fancy clothes, fancy car-ar”… To give you some idea of how far things have come, how low standards have dropped, I see this as the equivalent of 2Pac collaborating with the Spice Girls, or the Wu-Tang Clan deciding to feature Britney Spears on one of their songs doing a cover of “My Heart Will Go On.” It is just…utterly, utterly baffling.

To be fair, the album does have a handful of note-worthy tracks. Even though “I’m Illy” sounds exactly like Lil’ Wayne and could be his hit song “A Milli” if you say its title fast enough, it’s one of the few tracks with an ounce of menace to it. The same can be said about the sneering putdown of “What Up, What’s Haapnin” which magnifies T.I.’s trademark drawl to near-parodic levels. Even better is the empowerment anthem “No Matter What,” which is easily one of the best songs of the rapper’s career. Humble and blisteringly confident at the same time, the track sees T.I. open up with startling emotional honesty, rapping at the song’s peak “I lost my partner and my daughter in the same year / Somehow I rise above my problems and remain here.” It helps too that the song’s intensely personal lyrics are matched by the best production on “Paper Trail” – a rocking, strutting blaze of synths, guitars and strings, courtesy of Timbaland-protégé Danja.

On the whole though, “Paper Trail” is a fiasco, a disheartening confirmation that the lines between rap and pop have become too blurred to distinguish anymore. T.I. claims that “Paper Trail” was named after all the sheets of paper he used to write his lyrics, but I think he named it after something else – the stream of cash he’s desperately chasing after, hands out-stretched, dollar signs in his eyes. On certain parts of “Paper Trail,” there are hints of the T.I. who had credibility, of the charismatic, magnetic emcee who was instrumental in bringing international success to Southern rap. But it’s clear which T.I. has won the battle on “Paper Trail”: it’s the sell-out, obnoxiously rapping about private jets on “On Top of the World,” declaring that he can “drop Bentleys” anytime on “Whatever You Like,” and proudly announcing how good he is at stacking cash on the album’s intro. As underground rappers Binary Star once rapped: “Everything that glitters ain’t gold / And every gold record don't glitter that's for damn sure.”


"Paper Trail" released on September 26, 2008 by Atlantic Records.
Images courtesy of Atlantic Records and Empire Online.
Published in the Daily Princetonian.