ALBUM REVIEWS
It’s hard to believe that 2 Chainz still thinks he’s underrated in 2019.
“I know I am underrated,” he reaffirmed to Charlamagne Tha God on The Breakfast Club. “If you do a survey, people will sleep on me because sometimes they don’t understand it. It don’t bother me. I’ve always been highly confident. It’s a thin line between cockiness and confidence. And sometimes, I straddle both of them.”
Cockiness and confidence are how 2 Chainz has stayed on top of his game. It’s been his goal to be respected as one of the best MCs in hip-hop, regardless of how many people slept on his previous mixtapes and albums. Whether you know him as Tity Boi, the Drench God, or any other of his many AKAs, he is certainly the hardest working rapper who has earned his spot, rapping alongside the likes of Raekwon, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Drake, Pharrell, and Nicki Minaj since leaving Playaz Circle, his duo under Ludacris' label Disturbing Tha Peace. Throughout his catalog, which includes fan favorites T.R.U. REALigion and his Trap-A-Velli series, Chainz has shown immense growth as an artist, constantly drawing from his personal stories to create anthems for every occasion – hitting licks, throwing birthday parties, making your momma proud. Chainz always got one for you to walk in and then turn up to.
The 41-year-old rapper wants to continue maturing as an artist, hoping his music delivers on quality so he gets the credit he deserves. After the widespread acclaim of 2017’s Pretty Girls Like Trap Music, with many critics calling it his best work at the time, Chainz wasn’t satisfied with the praise. Recognizing his peers have been using their platforms to educate on subjects like ownership (Jay-Z) and criminal justice reform (Meek Mill), Chainz saw an opportunity to make another play, one that involves addressing a common misconception about what defines success among young black men in poor communities.
Rap or Go to the League, his fifth studio album, was announced in February 2018 as his version of “black excellence.” “In my culture, in my community, we were often told [that] it was the only thing and the only way we could get out of the circumstances we were put in,” he explains of the title. At the height of racial tensions across America, he elaborated on the concept as dissecting “some of the brainwashing formulas used in my community.” Chainz is a product of College Park, Georgia and considered a success story, evolving from being an ex-drug dealer and ex-athlete to a veteran rapper who has gotten better with age.
It’s why LeBron James, the executive producer and A&R of Rap or Go to the League, was perfect for the album’s messaging. The Lakers star was faced with his own set of criticisms when he talked politics during an ESPN interview, inciting journalist Laura Ingraham to attack his views. “Keep the political commentary to yourself,” she infamously said on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle. “Or as someone once said, ‘Shut up and dribble.’”
Chainz recognized that LeBron is not only a talented basketball player but plays an important position in hip-hop culture as a curator and celebrity influencer. Instagram Stories of him jamming and scrunching his face to early records by Tee Grizzley, Meek Mill, and Nipsey Hussle, as well as convincing Kendrick Lamar to drop untitled unmastered., are hallmarks of a good A&R. He is more than an athlete, using his voice to effect change, and nowhere near as one-dimensional as Ingraham suggested. In many ways, Rap or Go to the League is a justification that these two can step up and prove their doubters wrong: Chainz can be considered in the G.O.A.T. conversation, and LeBron can empower the youth to believe any dream is possible. You can rap. You can go to the league. You can be more than what society tells you to be.
Chainz uses his own narrative to drive these points on Rap or Go to the League. If LeBron didn’t convince you that Chainz was coming with substance, the album’s opener, titled “Forgotten,” sets the bar of how weighted his songs will be. Marsha Ambrosius anchors Chainz’ emotional lyrics on his hoop dreams turned to nightmares. The second verse is more telling as he reveals how he felt after learning about the murder of his friend and former Disturbing tha Peace labelmate Lil’ Fate’s son. “My head achin', hands started shakin' / Foul beyond flagrant / He said, ‘Bro, what I’m supposed to do?’ / I paused, remorseful / We been partners since public school / Kids ain’t supposed to die before us,” he raps. To end on a spoken word poem about the realities of a black boy living in America is Chainz exploring what it means to be socially conscious. It’s his mission to teach lessons now.
Chainz and LeBron wanted this album to be played from top to bottom so listeners can take everything in as a whole. Chainz’s first two albums – Based on a T.R.U. Story and B.O.A.T.S. II #METIME – lacked a cohesion that Rap or Go to the League clearly has grounded in Atlanta while elevating trap music to a new paradigm. Each song is based on a true story of Chainz’s life, where he’ll go from saying he owns his own masters (“Threat 2 Society”) to listing all the possible crimes he’s committed and the people he served back in the day (“Statute of Limitations”). In a full circle moment, Chainz has a legal marijuana business now called GAS Cannabis Co. No rap cap.
Chainz has a lot of pride in being a black entrepreneur, who is here to share his knowledge of success through his music. Topics like property investing to stunting in his own Versace collab are motivational benchmarks, but the messages amplify with his relatable, come-up stories. On songs like “I Said Me” and “I’m Not Crazy, Life Is,” Chainz wants you to know that he isn’t perfect, owning up to his past (“…And my daughter asked me what a drug dealer was? I said ‘me’”) and believing in his passion (“They say that I'm crazy now / They said I was crazy then”) are just some of the keys to unlocking your fullest potential. “Sam” tackles taxes on the wealthy, and the abuse of knowing your hard-earned income will be taken away by the government. Chainz is no stranger to this, using it as a life lesson: just dust your shoulders off and keep it moving.
Consistency is what keeps his fans coming back for more. And 2 Chainz knows he doesn’t need to break his formula, enlisting previous collaborators like Young Thug, Travis Scott, Lil Wayne, and Chance the Rapper to add the necessary bravado to each of his records. Ariana Grande appears on the Amerie-sampling “Rule the World,” which was created after the “7 Rings” misunderstanding, and it is easily a Billboard Hot 100 contender. The idea of 2 Chainz and Kendrick Lamar sounded dope on paper, surpassing expectations on “Momma I Hit a Lick.” If you needed a reason to go out west this summer, “Girl’s Best Friend” and “2 Dollar Bill” are an excellent back-to-back pair of songs for a cruise on Sunset Boulevard.
With all these all-star features on his resume, is 2 Chainz hot enough for a Jay-Z feature? The subtle homages to Hov – sampling “Lucifer” and “Dead Presidents” – and shouting him out on “Threat 2 Society” over a 9th Wonder beat are all perfect jumpers in form. Chainz has talked about working with Jay more than once, recently name-checking him on “Burglar Bars,” and it seems Jay is willing to collaborate even though he apparently missed this album. It’s a bucket list item that Chainz needs before Hov really retires.
There’s one line on “NCAA,” a boisterous track calling out why college athletes don’t get paid, where Chainz raps, “drop my album off the court and make 'em post it.” Not only is this “caption music” at the highest levels (that guitar line is an A1 bar too), it showcases how much admiration he has from the community during on and off season. Just days after Rap or Go to the League’s release, Diddy, Royce da 5'9", French Montana, and more promoted it on social media, congratulating him on what is unanimously his tightest project he’s ever made.
2 Chainz isn’t underrated. And even if you still think that after listening to Rap or Go to the League, he’s going to continue bettering himself, pushing boundaries in hip-hop and the intersecting cultures until that validation arrives.
“I ain’t gonna stop being myself, I ain’t gonna stop being highly talented. Qualified,” he said on The Breakfast Club.“I always told myself when I get to the table, whatever table that is, I deserve to be there.”
You deserve it and more, King Chainz.
The Ed Sheeran people remember from the early days, the one who got into drunken fights and wrote heartfelt love songs to make up for showing up late from the pub, would probably have turned Play into a drinking game. Every time he uses an explosion metaphor, you take a shot. If he brings up the stars, you finish your Guinness. If you are bold enough, you can add references to heaven into the mix, though I would not recommend it. Some quick back-of-the-napkin math suggests that by the 20-minute mark of Play, you would already be 13 shots deep.
Whatever you think of Sheeran, he has never come across this uninspired before. In the first decade of his career, he managed to use his “average guy” persona to hide a relentless drive for success, a quality he shared with his friend and collaborator Taylor Swift. He started with “The A Team,” an acoustic debut single about homelessness and drug addiction, and spun it into a series of albums filled with dependable wedding staples. Along the way, he leaned into flashy but practical genre experiments that produced high-stakes hits like “Shape of You,” “I Don’t Care,” and “Bad Habits.”
Sheeran’s most clever trick was realizing that his very everyday personal life gave him the freedom to take musical risks that would have been harder for other stars. He married his high school sweetheart, keeps close with his childhood friends, and has even joked about once soiling himself onstage. That kind of everyman image allowed him to dabble in grime, dancehall, and even release a song with Cardi B where she claimed that “Ed got a little jungle fever.” He never seemed like a jet-setting, trend-chasing multimillionaire. Instead, he was the relatable guy who could skim through Latin trap, hip-hop, and folk pop and somehow turn it all into hits.
By his own words, Sheeran no longer has that same fire. He told The New York Times, “Pop is a young person’s game and you have to really, really be in it and want it. I’ve found myself stepping back more and more and being like, actually, I’m really valuing family.” While this might seem like a quiet retreat from the pop machine, it undercuts the work of artists like Swift and Madonna, who have fought to prove that pop is not just for the young. And more importantly, it rings hollow when you listen to Play, which feels like a retreat after 2023’s and Autumn Variations, his first studio albums since 2011, not to top the Billboard 200.
For someone as fixated on stats as Sheeran, this fact must sting. Early in the Play, he even says he wants to “keep this Usain pace.” Yet you can also hear the exhaustion throughout the record, where he goes back to his two safest formulas, romantic wedding songs and “global” pop bangers, without much of the spark or warmth that made him such a draw in the first place. The result is a clash between lingering ambition and a lack of effort, leaving Sheeran sounding like the one thing he never wanted to be seen as: a calculating pop star driven more by the need to hold onto his status than by genuine love of music.
That shift was not inevitable. The first track, “Opening,” is actually one of the most interesting moments on the album. It starts with a soft acoustic intro before veering into some of Sheeran’s weakest attempts at rap: “In this world, there’s no relaxin’/I’ve been here since migraine skankin’/Never been cool, but never been a has-been.” His awkward rhymes and the sing-song delivery make it tough to listen to, but lyrically, it is revealing. He admits he may have “lost his way,” worries that his “career’s in a risky place,” and references fallings-out, though he never says exactly what they were. It sets up the possibility of an album where Sheeran might really reflect on his place in the music industry and in his own life.
That is not what Play turns out to be. Instead, when he circles back to those ideas, it is through heavy-handed sentiment. On the stomping sing-along “Old Phone,” he discovers a decade-old device full of texts and photos, including messages from exes and friends who have since passed away. His conclusion that maybe it is best left in the past feels obvious and flat. When he sings about the “overwhelming sadness” of friends he has lost, it comes across more like a diary entry than honest introspection. He doesn’t push deeper into what those feelings mean. For someone who doesn’t currently own a phone, Sheeran misses the irony that most people’s phones today are already crammed with both love and hate. By the bridge, he has tucked the phone away again, as if to wrap the idea neatly without exploring it further.
“Old Phone” at least tries something slightly new, but elsewhere Sheeran falls back on old patterns. On “Camera,” he revisits the reassuring-but-bland style of his One Direction co-write “Little Things,” reminding his partner she is beautiful despite insecurities. Then he flips the concept of his 2015 hit “Photograph,” singing, “I don’t need a camera to capture this moment/I’ll remember how you look tonight for all my life.” The effect is less touching and more like a tired echo of Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.”
The box-checking continues with songs like “In Other Words,” which feels like a weaker version of “Perfect,” and “The Vow,” which recalls “Thinking Out Loud.” Then there is “A Little More,” a bitter breakup track where Sheeran sings, “I can’t call you crazy/’Cause you could be diagnosed.” It reminds listeners of two things: he struggles to show empathy toward exes in his writing, and his attempts at humor rarely land.
The bright spots come when Sheeran leans into sounds outside his usual palette. “Azizam,” which takes its name from an Iranian term meaning “my darling,” is the most vibrant song here, full of energy and rhythm, with producer Ilya weaving in traditional Iranian instruments. “Sapphire,” a collaboration with Punjabi star Arijit Singh, and “Symmetry,” which builds on a lively tabla rhythm from Jayesh Kathak, are heavy-handed but carried by Sheeran’s genuine enthusiasm. The excitement in his delivery recalls the risk-taking that once made songs like “South of the Border” so oddly compelling. With Shah Rukh Khan, India’s biggest film icon, appearing in the “Sapphire” video, these songs are positioned to make a real impact.
On these tracks, Sheeran finally sounds engaged. He has said he finished the album in Goa, and these moments feel alive enough that you wish he had built the whole project around them. Still, the timing feels strange. Just one day before the album’s release, more than 110,000 far-right protesters marched through London, railing against immigration. Against that backdrop, Sheeran’s lighthearted collaborations with Indian and Iranian musicians feel disconnected, like escapist gestures at a time when such apolitical optimism already feels outdated.
The record closes with “Heaven,” one of its better songs, but also one that highlights Sheeran’s ongoing issues. On one level, it nods to a recurring critique of his work: even though he won both of his copyright lawsuits in 2023 and 2024, many listeners still hear echoes of other songs in his writing, and “Heaven” sounds a lot like Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” or Charli XCX’s “Everything Is Romantic.” On another level, its mix of light percussion and straightforward lyrics strikes a balance between the adventurousness he claims he has outgrown and the clichés that drag down much of the album. But then, as if unable to help himself, he falls back on familiar imagery: “Chemicals bursting, exploding/As every second’s unfolding.” Which, if you are playing the drinking game, means another double shot.
