Chief Keef & DP Beats - "Almighty DP"

[StevePulaski]

Almighty DP (2015)
By: Chief Keef & DP Beats

Rating: ★★

In contrast to Ballout and Tadoe's collaboration mixtape The Rise of Glo Gang Empire, the mixtape collaboration between Glo Gang's founder Chief Keef and producer DP Beats is precisely what happens when laziness prevails over craft. Almighty DP, while boasting some fairly solid trap production by its titular producer, is just another lazy Chief Keef mixtape disguised as something bigger than it actually is because this time a producer is placed at the forefront. I'm still waiting for the collaboration album between Keef and Zaytoven.

The problem seems to be that Keef's production shapes who he is as an artist, making him deeply inconsistent. When he works with Young Chop, he almost consistently produces songs of sublime quality. When he works with Terentino or Zaytoven, similar results entail. When he works with his own production (as he did with Back from the Dead 2) or in-house production (as he did with Sorry 4 The Weight), Keef flounders immensely, relying too much on the bass and the snare of the production that he forgets to include lyrics worth hearing or providing us with flows and verses worth remembering. Here, Keef is back to his lazy, sleepy roots, washing his tracks almost entirely in autotune or downright stupid lyrics that undermine his clearly driven personality and work ethic. For someone who claims to work as hard as he does, which I do not doubt, the quality of his music still leaves a lot to be desired.

Almighty DP features a barrage of songs that, again, bear idiotic lyrics or flows that are simply boring. For instance, "Sleepy"'s dazed and snooze-inducing sound comes off less like a cloud rap track and more like Keef himself being lyrically lazy but itching to record a new song. "Tec," which features Tadoe, plays like a leftover of the terrible Nobody with instrumentation that doesn't match Keef's lackadaisical flow. And, let's not forget, "Bands" and "Doin' It" are the same song, as if the same song was mistakenly put on the mixtape twice.

Songs of some discernible merit are the contemporary Keef classic "Fool Ya," which was released shortly before Back from the Dead 2, bearing an unusually aggressive sound from Keef that finally functions on the same plateau as DP's production, "Don't Love Her," which nicely evokes cloud rap tendencies and mixes them with the drill sound, makes for a song with some feelings and emotions expressed by Keef, and "Worries," where Keef's mumbling, vaguely-incoherent style works in a strangely zealous manner, where Keef seems, for once, involved in the song.

But, as expected, Almighty DP has its share of stupid lyrics. "Asap Rocky," one of the tape's worst songs, tries to turn the respective rapper's name into a slang word. Keef spits, "Pull up on your ass with this Asap doggy. I remember selling Asap Rocky, now I be getting Asap guapy" on the song's chorus. If this isn't the laziest example of songwriting and rapping, I don't know what it is. It doesn't improve when such lines as "I be eating Big Macs, large fry on the side," again, showing Keef's benign inclusions of his dietary habits in his songs. I reiterate my point that these lines are senseless and only work against the hardened, cold-hearted image Keef loves to convey in his songs.

DP's production, again, is for the most part effective in creating a dark mood and a sound that efficiently captures trap music, but Almighty DP is far too overstuffed with nonsense to be a commendable mixtape. At nineteen tracks, it only takes about six to recognize that this mixtape isn't going anywhere lyrically or stylistically, and further puts another middling effort in Keef's post-Finally Rich discography. I hail experimentation in film, music, and Television, but Keef's desire to make every mixtape sound so different tonally and structurally doesn't mask abysmal flow and ungodly moronic lyricism.

Recommended tracks (in order): "Fool Ya," "Don't Love Her," and "Worries."