Rick Ross f/ Nicki Minaj: "You the Boss"

While Bawse guest spots have become one of my favorite things in the world lately, it occurs to me that a) there have never been this many of them, let alone this many good ones, and b) when I think of “Rick Ross as main artist” I think three words: Hustlin’, Big, and Meech. As Colin so astutely pointed out in his review of 2010’s Teflon Don, while Rick Ross can seem to have his shit together, his main flaw is that having one’s shit together can be awfully boring.

However, Self Made Vol. 1 (2011) hasn’t just turned Maybach Music from a vanity marque into a contender (albeit one with trademark issues similar to our own), it’s given Rawse a context for his guttural utterances, and in a way that’s served him much better than Hova’s Roc or Wayne’s Young Money. The current flood of featured appearances find him enthusiastically reinforcing the authority of his proteges (particularly the awesomely happy Meek Mill) or shoehorning yet another acronym into the already crowded rap acronym stratosphere.

This background maneuvering into the pantheon was much needed, as Ross has always been more about style and aura than, well, songs. By physically abutting much smaller rappers (physically and vocally) all year, he’s established himself as a necessary counterweight, his superconfident “huh” making the absurdity of, say, Lil Wayne that much more clear and resonant. Now that he’s moving back into a solo album cycle, it looks as though he has remembered that lesson, and it makes “You The Boss” a funny, welcome next step.

Nicki Minaj originally wrote the the song for Lil Wayne, and while she doesn’t even get a verse here, she remains the catalyst behind a genuine Rick Ross love song, and a kind of sad one at that. This is no didactic “How to Love”—this is a Rick Ross singles ad, and that cheesiness works well as an absurdity for him to render sane via the savory elongation of the word “boss.” Swathed in dinky synths and Minaj cooing the title, he has to fight with fake toughness on every line to emerge unscathed. Plus, his occasional silly image—“Fur coats in the winter / Look like a polar bear” chief among them—is the song’s main draw. His hulking shit-togetherness as the pining need of a Boss for an Underling is ridiculous, and all further weirdness is transcendent. “You The Boss” crowns a year of going from style to persona to indispensable iconography, and it’s an appropriately bizarre way to do it.