My goal in life is to be “Past my Prime”.
Past your Prime used to be an insult to me until I realized that it means at one point you were the best. Wack people never have a “prime”. Brian Scalabrine was never “over the hill” the Big Bang Theory never “jumped the shark”. You gotta be great in your past to have a point of reference.
TI is “Past his Prime”. TI isn’t the gold grill nigga from Bankhead rapping about survival or his Chevy, he’s slowed down, become a family man and sees a much bigger picture.
As the phrase goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, luckily TI knows a lot of words so he decided to drop a new album “Dime Trap”.
Let’s get to it.
TI knows how to rap. When it comes to putting words together there are few that are more skilled than Clifford Harris. He’s never been an overly technical but he knows how to weave words into an engaging tapestry. No matter what TI is trying to rap about you will always see it clearly. If he wants to rap about crack, you’ll see the rocks, if he wants to rap about politics, you’ll see the ballot box and if he wants to rap about saving the youth, you can see the classroom. TI knows what he’s doing, even when he isn’t doing shit, he knows he’s not doing shit.
Dime Trap is like listening to your friends cool dad break down life while pretending he doesn’t know your high. Tip casually recounts real ass situations and the lessons he learned from each one. He doesn’t sound proud of his actions he reminisces, but he does sound like he needs you to know he was out here.
The craziest part of this album is that the album is filled with drop ins from Dave Chappelle. However much like Tip he’s not putting too much effort into saying anything as he knows his presence holds more weight. Listening to Dave Chappelle’s say ambiguously motivational things is really special. He needs to do this more often.
Overall this album is a lot like watching a former Starter settle into a role as a player-coach; he can drop some hits when he has to, but it feels like he’s more suited providing the next generation with the right tools to rich the same heights.
Dime Trap ain’t Urban Legend, but it will get you to work on Time. I give Dime Trap 6.5 Cigarettes hanging out an Old Black Mans mouth out of 10.