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Music

Listen to Boosie Badazz's New Mixtape, 'Life After Deathrow'

Boosie Badazz returns in just the right way.

While Boosie was long considered an all-time great across the South, in the years since he went to prison, it's become kind of conventional wisdom that he is one of the all-time greats in rap, period. And how do you return to rap, after the better part of a decade, when rap has spent all that time changing and somebody went off and invented selfies and someone else went off and invented the Migos and expectations for your return have just kept building and building? How do you deliver on the promise that has been made on your behalf that you are, in fact, one of the best rappers of all time?

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Honestly, you probably do exactly what Boosie has done in the seven months or so since his release and just kind of do what feels right, without overhyping your return or further fanning the flames of expectations. You drop the odd freestyle or loose track, you pop up on features for artists like K. Camp and Snootie Wild and T.I., and then you drop a mixtape like Life After Deathrow, which offers the quiet reassurance that you are not only one of the greatest rappers of all time but you are that important because you are one of the most complex rappers, one of the most empathetic rappers, one of the most lyrically riveting rappers of all time. Life After Deathrow isn't a flashy statement or some kind of victory lap of reconquest. It's not, at least in what I've heard of it while writing this news post that it exists, Boosie in rapid-fire, burning-down-everything-in-his-path mode. For the most part, it's slow and contemplative and not always even strictly rhyming. And it is excellent.

Boosie is lyrically vivid, and he's quick to switch between light-hearted—saying he's "in the streets, the Real Nigga Obama" or explaining "Boosie got 99 problems / and five are a bitch / 'cause I got five baby mamas / with five different personalities"—and completely earnest, with lines like "that little boy / I give him hope to stop selling dope / and put that mic to his mouth and rap / and make it off that corner" or "you either go to school for years and chase hopes / or help your mama pay the bills and sell coke." He is lyrical in the true, poetic sense of the word, in that his lyrics are substantive and significant. Everything he says has heart. It's not always serious—there is, after all, a song all about "grade A bitches"—but it's always approachable. He's relatable in the sense that he actually, consciously relates to his audience. Someone else might turn a song called "FaceTime" featuring Trey Songz into a sleazy, one-note joke about iPhones and sex with models, but Boosie is different. There's a line that goes "you going to work / FaceTime with your scrubs on," and it's that detail—the scrubs, the indication that Boosie's girl has a job in medicine—that sells it, that makes it more powerful than any of the dozens and dozens of flimsy Trey Songz rap features out there. Boosie is real, in the best way, and Life After Deathrow is an appropriate welcome home. Check it out below: