Wale f/ Rick Ross & Meek Mill: "Ambition"

Last year I drove a truck around Manhattan on the weekends, running the outdoor markets for a lobster shack. It had no features save a radio, which I tuned more or less constantly to Hot 97. Needless to say, it was one of the best years of my life. Since I don’t really need to be augmenting my income with weekends spent getting in shouting matches with garage attendants or arguing with cops on Wall Street, I quit, and now have lots of free time. I feel creatively productive and relaxed, but also vaguely sad. Rap in 2011 made me feel more engaged with music and the world than at any time since high school. Leaving behind the blinding edge of popular rap felt like Toy Story, abandoning behind my imaginary best friends—Wale, Sean, Rick, Meek, Drake, Weezy, Kanye and Jay.

At a continual loss for what I could review since ditching the truck, this week I Googled “Meek Mill single,” finding that the Ross and Mill-featuring title track of Wale’s Ambition (2011) had charted mildly. To me, much of the excitement of Hot 97 was the feeling of a perfect democracy, ultimate populism. Local comers and survivors like A$AP Rocky or Maino get equal footing with commercial giants like Lil’ Wayne or Beyonce, and other than a J. Cole-sized hole in my argument, the most groundbreaking and exciting songs tend to get the most play, multiple times an hour, for months, a narative showcase of alliances, rebellions, and the durability of great art. Unlike pop radio, where one Ke$ha single is as good as the last, Hot 97 will try a new Wayne single and then go back to the last one. As of today, they are still playing “She Will.”

Which brings me to “Ambition.” “Ambition” is not on the flash fiction-short Hot 97 playlist right now. “Slight Work,” the Diplo, Sean, and Wale jam which I reviewed right on the cusp of its ascendancy last year, is. “Ambition” probably sounds too much like “She Will” to get played until the latter song is retired; fittingly, both songs are produced by T-Minus, whose sense of propulsive forboding can also be found on DJ Khaled’s posse cut “I’m On One,” one of the most iconic songs of 2011. With orchestral flourishes making “Ambition” seem like a sadder version of Drake’s “Over,” Wale’s declaration that “they’re gonna love me for my ambition” comes off not as a boast but defiant in the face of a constant uphill battle to get radio attention.

Even Rick Ross and Meek Mill, who together have enough charisma and bombast to start a religion-track cult of personality, sound chastened, with Mill promising that him and Maybach Music will “bring that Warner back,” which is sort of like Cormac McCarthy boasting that him and Knopf will bring Borders back. Ross’ bone-rattling “hunhs” are buried in the mix, and other than referring to good coke as “that Cyndi Lauper,” he takes a momentary break from hilarious, colossal self-mythologizing, his ruminations on coming up when his “father was missing / War Lord Oliver North” notable mostly for how unusually small-scale they are.

Wale is still proof that talent, ambition, and good beat/posse choices don’t make a star; individuality, self-mythology, and punchlines do. The parent album is as sporadically brilliant as any upper-middle quality mainstream rap album or mixtape, and without radio as my lodestar I continue to feel lost, musically, as sad as the serious piano that underlies “Ambition.” But that narrative is still there, woven in the moments of genius that tie together the genre. T-Minus carves out a niche as distinctive as Lex Luger’s wall of sound or Noah “40” Shebib’s near-ambient touch, and Wale eases into a decent career as a cipher for the real stars to give their uncharacteristic verses and beats to. And maybe it’s possible to stay on top of it all without Hot 97. I haven’t outgrown them yet. There are always more mixtapes to trawl through—maybe this is the week to finally conquer the 2 Chainz discography…