Playboy Tre
Last Call
Making art out of misfortune is a dangerous game, if we're willing to take a moment and expand the definition of "dangerous" to incorporate things like "failing to do so" and "being embarrassed" alongside the sort of danger involved in physically related tasks. (Which is what we're going to do for the next couple of paragraphs.) The traps with painful disclosure are hard to spot--go too sincere, you'll alienate the ironic (an estimable bracket), go too insular, you'll confuse the dilettante (they outnumber the fan 1000 to 1), and if you do it too often, everybody quits caring about you entirely.
Are we building up to the moment where we ape Last Call's bravado to etch claims of Playboy Tre's mastery of incisive brilliance with which he nailed the task? Not exactly. He's a little too compulsive about repeatedly barking true ownership over the performance of gotta-get-paid rap tasks like "grinding" and "hustling", to the point where the words have about as much meaning as the word "fuck" does in a David Mamet play. He seems irritated that you don't remember the Luniz, who had five on it. He has a tendency to botch the landing as he leaps back and forth between being nakedly honest (like when he talks about how his commitment to free mixtapes and the resultant "exposure" does little for his family when his mother is about to be foreclosed upon) over to aggressively offensive posturing (he certainly cares about his people, but his voice is never as gutturally excited as when he gets to spit a stream of "gutter shit bitch nigger"). The dichotomy isn't that he does one thing badly, it's that he does both (being nasty, being sincere) extremely well, often inside the same song. At one point, he criticizes a 26 time usage of "nigger" as being "pathetic", but after a brief pause, he lets loose a Disney villain cackle. He cares about being serious, but he's not about to wear a backpack. When promoting the mixtape, he explained the title's meaning by saying "It's saying that I'm back and if there's any bullshit in the air, it's over with. It's last call. You have no time. It's my time here now. It's my time to be heard."
He's not being dishonest when he describes Last Call in those words, but he is being a bit disingenuous for the sake of making noise. Sure, there's instructions and condemnations all over the album--he can tell you aren't working that hard by checking your shoes for wear and tear, he'll remind you to you to look in the mirror and then happily point out that, since you have the time to do so, you're obviously not giving the work your all--but if you take a step back, Tre's well aware that it's his guest appearances alongside the hyper-popular B.o.B. that have made his name outside of the mixtape set more than any sort of Spartan commitment to "hustling". He never goes into full trickster mode more than in the album's trilogy of skits. There, the attacks bent on skewering prominent mixtape producers work as in-jokes to the knowledgeable, but even better, they're exceptionally funny to the novice (and in one test case, to those who have zero experience at all). Tre's eventual conclusion to the onslaught of self-promoting nonsense--a wearied sigh, the decision to "do it myself"--sounds less like a personal mission statement, more like a guy who just grasped what so many musicians now face: the choice between pursuing the by-chance lottery of widespread success, or a hard-earned grind, the self as judge, and an open door to whomever might come along.
-Tucker Stone, 2010
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