Birdman & Lil’ Wayne "1st Key"

Let me first begin my making the perhaps bold pronouncement that Like Father, Like Son is leagues (leagues, I say) better than the pretty good (but ultimately too mixtapey) Dedication 2 from earlier this year. Seriously, if you’re looking to buy a seriously great rap record right now, this is the one. Its greatest strength is exactly what so much rap music lacks—uniformity throughout the entire record, of both thematic and musical elements. The beats are selective, shiny and pungent, the rhymes are often brilliant and always unique, and most crucially, the interplay between Lil’ Wayne and Birdman (aka the guy who also owns the label btw) feels so natural as to actually make me question the poetic license of the album title. It’s a thick, conceptual record, and unlike so many rap records that posit some sort of unifyling thread and only reference it obliquely or just with skits, Like Father, Like Son is wholly constituted by numerous interpretations of the term “family” (apparently, it comes from the fact that Bird gave Wayne his first break at like 15 years old). But in lieu of going too deep into other songs I can’t post though, I just want to talk a bit about the one that most immediately grabbed my attention, “1st Key” (mp3). A sequel of sorts to UGK’s Menace II Society contribution and “comin’ up”-themed classic “Pocket Full of Stones” (mp3) “Key” chops up its inspiration and lets Pimp C and Bun B exchange bars with Weezy and Bird like they’re in the studio with them. On the original, C starts a verse with the line “I bought my first key from my baby mama brother,” but the patralineality of Father pushes it into the starrring role, if not only as my personal earworm for the past week or so (it’s an awkward line to be caught singing before class, for one thing). And where the original song features a humid, lazy, echo-laden beat, “1st Key” ratchets up the “Cisco Kid” quotient, making it sound more like a soundtrack for an extended family barbeque than a hazed-out afternoon in the living room with the shades pulled.

Like Father, Like Son comes out on Halloween via Cash Money Records.