The Gibbs in this song is trying to go legit, telling himself "that every time I touch the dope that it's gonna be my last flip, man." But you can feel the world around him closing in - he can't get away from the drug life he's begun, he can't away from his own additions as he sells addition to others, he doesn't want his daughter to end up the same way. The best example comes in late-album highlight "Freddie Gordy". Instead, the in-the-moment aggression is always tainting with desperation. When Gibbs isn't in that nostalgia, he's still not full-on flexing. In these moments, some of the most potent on the album, Gibbs seems lost in looking back, capturing the feeling and details perfectly, but there's a pang of heartache to the proceedings, not at what was done right or wrong, but at the passage of time, at how those roads impossibly led here. "Packages" plays like hard trap, but the faint whispering and piano keys make it sound like a song haunted by the past. "Extradite" plays on a watery, distant sample of mid-'70s soul that melts into dream-like chimes. The faint string sounds that waft along the beat on "Fuckin' Up the Count" almost feel sepia-toned. In place of that bragging, we get something else from the 33-year-old Gibbs: nostalgia. The story is one of successfully working his way through the rap game, through the violence and danger of it all, but it's not the kind of don braggadocio we'd get from, say, a kingpin blowhard like Rick Ross. "Teacher said go get a job / I said where the scale at?" he asks more than once here, hinting at not only a young Gibbs's mindset, but also at a lack of options. Gibbs is one of our finest crime storytellers, and the details he leans on frame the story well. That darkness comes up in "Fuckin' Up the Count", but Gibbs also plays with all of that shadow. The beat, built (like several great tracks here) by Blair Norf, stomps darkly along, but the shadows here don't feel like they're cast by Gibbs and his prodigious talent, but rather they are the things obscuring him in darkness. He's getting ready to push back, but he also feels weighted down. "You don't know who to trust," he admits, with more than a hint of aggression.
But halfway through the rap game, the drug game, the government, pretty much everyone around Gibbs seems to be closing him in. It's, on one level, a classic boast tune, one where no other rapper can match up to Gibbs, where people are aping his style. It's no wonder, then, that the album starts with a song called "Rearview". On Shadow of a Doubt, Gibbs the man takes a backseat to his words, to the stories he's telling, to the past these songs get lost in. It's obscured by darkness, something the covers of Pinata or Baby Face Killa don't do.
The album cover doesn't show Gibbs's face. Make no mistake, it stands on its own as a solid collection, but it's as if the twists in its predecessors laid the groundwork for us to catch the nuance of this record. It was an important record for Gibbs, a sign that he still had room to grow as a rapper, that there was versatility we had missed before, and that he was still capable of surprising us.Īnd maybe it's following Piñata that makes Shadow of a Doubt feel that much fresher. What was one workman-like now seemed almost playful, even if it still came off as deadly serious. Over Madlib's ever-shifting beats, Gibbs reminded us of the versatility of his rhythms and rhyme patterns. Piñata, Gibbs's 2014 album with Madlib, changed that narrative a bit. So Baby Face Killa came out - strong and confident throughout - we head-nodded in appreciation, and then went waiting for him to raise the impossibly high bar he'd already set. His workman-like flow and consistency were things we started counting on and then, nonchalantly expecting. There was a moment there when Freddie Gibbs could have been taken for granted. Freddie Gibbs Shadow of a Doubt US Release:
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