$oul $old $eparately is an Experimental Chapter for Omni-Lyrical Freddie Gibbs, and That’s a Good Thing
Evan Dale // October 11, 2022
For more than a decade, Freddie Gibbs has been marked by his tunnel vision. Raps refined from his cold midwestern roots; character development carved from the powder-slinging Freddie Kane to the ruthless street poet with a vulnerable edge and a sense of humor that never ceases to take it too far; beats forged from the annals of hip-hop greatness, most memorably by way of legendary producers, Madlib and The Alchemist. From them have come four Gibbs albums with a focused sound born from vinyl-scratching old-schoolery, hyper-speed flow, and vivid lyricism. Piñata, Fetti, Bandana, Alfredo. They’re the projects that are easiest to point to not only for Gibbs’ hard-earned ascent up the hip-hop ladder, but for the establishment of his signature sound that is of particularly standout quality given the ups and downs of hip-hop through the 2010’s and 20’s thus far. It’s a formula that has felt necessary across multiple moments of modern rap where complacency and mediocrity run rampant, constantly in need of the lessons that Gibbs has always been willing to teach. Fighting off trends in favor of timelessness, he's built something long-lasting in an era of the short-lived. But, through it all, even his own sound has at times felt not complacent, but certainly predictable and formulaic in its own underlying aesthetic. That changes with $oul $old $eparately, where Gibbs experiments with his sound more than ever before.
It would be brash to claim that any one project through Gibbs’ prolific run has been the album. And if the question were raised, the answer would most likely be Piñata. The 2014 release was a bookmark for Gibbs, for Madlib, and for hip-hop at large, pulling in tow a newly rekindled adherence to the poeticism of it all merged with a pack of beats that could have come straight from the 90’s, and a prevailing lack of fucks that has always delineated the Freddie Gibbs identity. Raw is the word for it. But now he takes his jab at something a little more polished, a little more experimental, and significantly more wide-ranging. Because of it, $$$ is also a quintessential Freddie Gibbs album, albeit shining under a completely different light.
In so many ways, the album feels like a new chapter - as did Piñata where Gibbs ushered in a renaissance for the hard-hitting, lawless braggadocio at rap’s roots, merging with his stranglehold on a dictionary and flow that is largely unparalleled. $$$ instead maneuvers wildly through the reach of Gibbs’s own auditory aesthetic instead of one framed by the boundaries of a producer’s own signature. Calling into the project so many varied beat makers capable of knitting together an impeccably broad soundscape, it’s still tethered to Gibbs's course to this point. But, it takes on new challenges and subsequently, achieves new heights. $$$ sees its protagonist prove that he’s still the best at his own game, but can likewise stand next to myriad other artists of all different stylistic backdrops. Tied together only by the brash, undying bars at Freddie Gibbs’s disposal and the hotel receptionist - along with a slurry of polarizing cameos - who act as intermissionary tour-guides across the loose concept’s length, $$$ is an exploration of just what it is Gibbs has long been suppressing in exchange for his steadfast signature. Undeniably one of the most potent lyricists alive, that underground-adjacent knack for real rap doesn’t disappear here, but instead serves as Gibbs’s foundational North Star in the process of attacking new sounds from new angles.
Freddie Gibbs has always made far-reaching hits, intermixing them into a volatile cocktail of brash lyricism and lightning-fast flow through his projects. But every track on $$$ breathes of something for both the lyrically adherent, old-school reminiscing fans of rap’s purest form, and for the casual, modern hip-hop fan who looks to the dynamism of $$$ with admiration for Gibbs’s willingness and ability to formulate everything from club anthems and vulnerable essays on emotion, to spooky Neo-Soul explorations and his innermost timeless rap. It’s not to say any track feels watered down from a songwriting perspective either, or that the whole project suffers some sort of lack of continuity. On the contrary, Freddie’s established genius at writing raps has manifested in a vibrant virtuoso for songwriting and wholesale album composition. Where once stood Madlib and The Alchemist bricklaying new levels to the most ardently unbreakable rap pillars, now stand Madlib and The Alchemist still, blended into a collection of further producers that build an expansive soundscape more identifiably Gibbs than an album of their own design, even as their previous four have thus far defined Gibbs’s career. Through many years and many projects of mastering his craft, $$$ is Gibbs’s most uniquely independent album, even as it ushers in the widest mosaic of featuring artists and producers.
That fact merely speaks to how wide Gibbs’s influence reaches in today’s game, and just how many influential names wish to join forces with him. Kelly Price (Couldn’t Be Done), Anderson .Paak (Feel No Pain), and Musiq Soulchild (Grandma’s Stove) see a collection of soul-slinging melodists that span eras bring Freddie Gibbs into spaces of both musical and emotional vulnerability. The latter in particular is an eye-opening barrage of self-aware storytelling from Gibbs that continues to make him one of the most honest forces in hip-hop. Raekwon (Feel No Pain), Pusha-T (Gold Rings), and Scarface (Decoded) make up the team of all-time lyrical powerhouses that Gibbs brings into the album not only to prove his own poetic stamina alongside theirs, but to continue his steadfast tradition of putting out the hardest hitting rap projects in the game’s upper echelon. It’s an aspect of the album that is carried even further forward in its no-feature cuts. The melody-meets-lyricism barrage of Zipper Bagz, the defiant flow of Space Rabbit’s immersion into Gibbs’s roots, the anthemic sentiment of Rabbit Vision’s finally-made-it mentality, and the composition notebook braggadocio of CIA express his penned genius fully. Offset (Pain & Strife), Moneybag Yo (Too Much), and Rick Ross (Lobster Omelette) pull Gibbs into his most mainstream form, bringing a pace and a sense of penned depth to the clubbiest of bangers on $$$, without losing sight of the project’s identity.
And yet, the trait that sets $oul $old $eparately apart from even Freddie Gibbs’s most well-recognized masterpieces is the breadth of its producers, and the doors they open for Freddie to explore his own range like never before. James Blake, DJ Paul (who also has a verse carved from Southern mud on PYS), J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, Boi 1da, KAYTRANADA, and many more join the ranks of Madlib and The Alchemist to provide Freddie with the kind of foundation he was always destined to thrive overtop. He’s always been treated as a bridge between the 90’s and the now, better than anyone else alive at infusing his music first and foremost with brash, dynamic penmanship and a timeless delivery. But with $oul $old $eparately, he’s stretching the influence of that bridge into the future while proving that he’s not only one of the most lyrically dominant rappers of all time, but a force for melodic and experimental musical range.