Album Review: Alfredo by Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist
Genre: Hip-Hop
Track List: 10
Alfredo is not like most hip hop albums released this decade. A collaborative effort from Freddie Gibbs and producer The Alchemist, the album delivers a certain commendable maturity. Freddie is not your contemporary and he wants you to know it.
With a self-confidence bordering on unrestricted arrogance, Freddie proclaims himself at God-level and lines like “Michael Jordan, 1985, bitch, I travel with a cocaine circus” makes one wonder if he is right.
It is not hard to decode the album’s title. In between “I make a song weep, I got the game hurt” and “Used to ride in the clean A3, With the wood and the Louis V’s on my seat”, most of the songs on the album are indeed about Freddie and his wealth. It seems he really wants us to know how financially stable he is.
But Alfredo is not all about Freddie hyping himself. In All of Me, himself and Conway the Machine rap about implied expectations and foisted demands; touching on friendships, obligation to one’s mother and absent-fatherism. Jabs were thrown in between the self-hyping on Frank Lucas (“You niggas snitchin’, gettin’ time shaved”) and Skinny Suge highlighted the volatility of the society (“Man, my uncle died off a overdose, And the fucked up part about that is I know I supplied the nigga that sold it”).
Like every good Hip-Hop album, there are plethora of innuendos and talk about drugs and women. Cocaine is consistently referred to, the crack epidemic is broached in Baby $hit, revealing an undeniable reality of the community and the uncomfortable fact that some black are responsible for the mess. Freddie would flow effortlessly with a story or thought — usually, drugs, women or himself — until he drops a line so bad it makes you cringe. That is how things like, “Cougar pussy, I fuck a rich nigga wife” and “Flew a ho like 20 hours just to have a threesome with my new Australian bitch” from Baby $hit slip through and slap you out of no where.
But that’s the thing about Alfredo — it is like a 90’s hip-hop album in more ways than one. While rap has gone mainstream and been fused with pop music in the past two decades, the album feels like a blast from the past, delivering a strong dose of nostalgia. However, for its obsession with Godfather-like figures, the album focuses on characters like Frank Lucas, black people that sold drugs to black people.
Beyond the lyrics and the themes, Alfredo’s music has more in common with the last decade of the 20th century than the 21stcentury. It has jazz and even a hint of soul; Scottie Beam, God is Perfect and Something to Rap About featuring Tyler, the Creator radiate with a subtle mastery that attests to The Alchemist’s prowess at providing Freddie with the appropriate beat to flow with.
Rating: 7/10
