Gucci Mane & Chief Keef - "Big Gucci Sosa"

[StevePulaski]

Big Gucci Sosa (2014)
By: Gucci Mane & Chief Keef

Rating: ★★½

Gucci Mane and Chief Keef, two of trap music's most prolific forces, try their hand at a collaboration mixtape, which contributes to Keef's catalog of mixtapes and Gucci's laundry list of mixtapes/albums released following his 2014 incarceration. Big Gucci Sosa is famous for being released on Halloween 2014, the same day as Back from the Dead 2, Keef's sequel mixtape to his monstrous 2011 success. While that mixtape was a complete and utter disappointment, this particular one has certain appeal and it all starts with the addition of a guest star who isn't a part of Keef's Glo Gang label.

The problem with Keef, I feel, is he's surrounded by too many "yes men," who affirm his creativity path all too much, which results in incoherent projects like his digital album Nobody and the underwhelming Back from the Dead 2. By having Gucci Mane on a mixtape, Keef seems to be more concerned with his lyrical flow, giving a very energetic and fast-paced performance on the tape's opener "Semi on 'Em" and even achieving a more charismatic personality on "Top in the Trash." When he's working with Gucci, he also seems livelier instead of being encapsulated in slurry, interchangeable cloud rap ballads that make for dreary and redundant listens.

Of course, as expected, with this new brand of Keef, who attempts to make every mixtape sound different from his last, there's the factor of disappointment I'm always ready to face when it comes to his material and that disappointment does seep through with Big Gucci Sosa. I can forgive a stupid song like "Baby Daddy Broke" or the obnoxiously repetitive "First Day of School" (I still affirm that the best song with this title belongs to Soulja Boy) if Keef didn't, for lack of a better term, "waste" most of his production. Keef has a bad habit of letting the instrumentation of his songs "breathe" too much, accompanying these pauses by directionless "uh's" and "yeah's" that do nothing for the song except make one question whether or not Keef even knows the lyrics to the song he's singing.

This tendency is exploited throughout Big Gucci Sosa, resulting in numerous tracks that, combined with Keef's occasionally lackluster lyrics and Gucci's mediocre rhymes, are just forgettable after the first listen (the track "So Much Money" is one of the most pitiful excuses for trap I've heard in a while). And yet, however, the mixtape hits certain highs with a few tracks and the fact that these two talents, who have more-or-less commanded the genre they work in, can collaborate for a project makes this tape, at the very least, worth a look. The best thing about this mixtape, though, is the fact that it's only a pithy twelve tracks, as opposed to the ear-numbingly long and exhausting twenty tracks we saw on Back from the Dead 2.

Recommended tracks (in order): "Semi on 'Em," "Top in the Trash," and "Still Pimpin'."