Yo Gotti - White Friday (CM9)

Pitchfork 68

Yo Gotti has long been Memphis’ biggest rap star, but he’s also spent his 30s on the cusp of something more, idling through several underperforming major-label releases while nurturing the mixtape cred that built his name. And then suddenly, in early 2016, Gotti scored big with “Down in the DM,” a late-career social media smash that had propped up his fifth album in 2015 and wedged his name into new conversations, like the one that must have precipitated his appearance on a Meghan Trainor breakup single called “Better” last year. It wasn’t until 2016 that Gotti was the type to get a crossover call like that. So, how does a late bloomer mixtape rapper seize his moment to sidle into the spotlight? Smartly, he’s back on the circuit. Kind of.

Gotti’s latest seems to be billed as an album first, White Friday, and mixtape second, CM9, but he’s clearly folding his long-running Cocaine Muzik mixtape series into a newfound industry prominence, serving up his usual street fare with a bit more polish. To be sure, Gotti has a better track record as a mixtape slinger than he does as a major-label rap album artist, and CM9 benefits from a low-stakes formula that’s less concerned with stringing together a narrative than it is with song-by-song quality control. The Art of Hustle, Gotti’s last album, saw him overextended, trying to frame himself in with a single statement-worthy piece of work; CM9 instead is a snapshot of Gotti in stride.

This new project’s bookends are the most explicitly self-referential of the rapper’s big 2016, and he grapples aloud with his come up. He isn’t known for clever lyricism, but Gotti can make a straightforward phrase sound agile. “Biggest year of my career and I could feel the pressure, gotta follow-up,” he snips on “81,” a slapper of an intro and fine microcosm of Gotti’s honed simplicity. Tracks like “Off da Top (3am)” don’t fare as well, and scan instead like generically manufactured trap.

On “Blah Blah Blah” Gotti casts himself as a petty asshole over an eerie banger, taunting an ex while turning his attention elsewhere. He sounds utterly unlikeable through it all. But the tease—“All I heard is ‘blah blah blah blah blah’”—spills throughout the song with enough charisma to worm into your ear like a bully’s “neener neener.” On the last track, Gotti endears instead, dropping his guard to memorialize his former manager, Mel Carter, who passed away less than a month before this mixtape was released. Gotti narrates as much as he raps, thanking an old friend for an overdue come-up they’ll never see through together. “If I knew talkin’ to you was my last time/The other night, it wouldn’t have been about no CM9,” Gotti promises.

Sometimes Gotti turns in a better chorus himself than the mixtape’s guests designated for the job. Kodak Black is the exception that steals the show on “Weatherman,” hawking a fresh-out-of-jail hook about coming up and needing more, ad-libbing it all in his stylish whine. Gotti has taken a mixtape-like approach to sharing space with his featured emcees, but he’s nearly overstocked the tracklist’s obvious centerpiece. “Castro” is a star-studded blunder that packages some of the mixtape’s best and worst rapping hand-in-hand. Big Sean and Kanye West are here mostly in spirit, crashing the party with unforgivably clunking punch-ins like “Spanish chick—J. Lo” and “Astronaut—takeoff.” Quavo and 2 Chainz save the day with full-length verses of their own, injecting a bit of zany character into an otherwise tepid group project. Several months after the same troupe of emcees gathered for a Kanye West single called “Champions,” “Castro” feels a bit like the party’s stale leftovers. But it’s still a coup for Gotti, and he holds his own confidently. Last year, he plucked “Down in the DM” from its original mixtape tracklist and built a year and bonafide album around its success. Gotti’s chipped away and crammed at least a couple more single-worthy tracks into White Friday, enough maybe to keep himself afloat through 2017. Either way, the guy doesn’t let up.