After that, Gibbs and Madlib both went on their ways, making good records that didn’t quite stack up to what they’d done together. The result is a quiet miracle, a record that sticks with you. So did legends like Raekwon and Scarface.
Members of rap’s smart-kid cognoscenti - Mac Miller, Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown - showed up and made contributions. And Gibbs had to change his approach, to realize he was making inward-excursion music rather than street anthems. Madlib had to make relatively linear beats, beats that would give Gibbs’ snarl room to resonate. They both had to extend themselves out of their comfort zones. He and Gibbs are strange partners, but together, they work.įive years ago, Gibbs and Madlib made Piñata, a happy experiment of a record. Instead, he was always happy making woozy headphone music. Madlib never threatened to become a star, the way Gibbs did. He found like-minded collaborators - J Dilla, MF DOOM - and perfected his own broken, splintered, sample-driven form of rap psychedelia. Madlib came from a family of jazz musicians, and he made records that progressively drifted further and further into the astral abstract. The bigger Likwit Crew names - King Tee, tha Alkaholiks, Xzibit - were the same sort of populist-underground tough-talkers that Freddie Gibbs would become. When he first started, as a member of the ’90s Oxnard rap crew Lootpack, he was a loose affiliate of the Likwit Crew, a group of workmanlike Californian rap head-slappers.
Madlib, by contrast, has always been an experimenter. So he got himself dropped and learned to exist on the internet, where he found an audience that loved that throwback gutter-talk shit. But in the ’00s, when he signed his first misbegotten Interscope deal, that approach was no longer a populist one, and Gibbs was adrift. Once upon a time, that might’ve made him a star, or at least a cult favorite capable of moving vast quantities of CDs to a devoted audience. Instead, Freddie Gibbs is an unflashy artisan, and he’d probably be happy rapping over 808 thuds and G-funk synth-whines for the rest of his career. He knows how to rattle off syllables with astonishing speed while staying in the beat’s pocket and maintaining a calm, conversational presence. He understands the concept of flow like few others. As a pure technical rapper, he’s breathtaking. He talks about growing up amidst violence and poverty with a rare gravity, and he brings granular detail and clear bloodthirsty delight to his drug-trade stories. Gibbs comes from the burned-out and forgotten city of Gary, Indiana, and he makes snarling, unpretentious, head-down gangsta rap music. The combination of Freddie Gibbs and Madlib makes no sense, which is why it makes the most sense.
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