Waka Flocka Flame

DuFlocka Rant Vol. 1: 10 Toes Down

(Self-released; 2011)

By Colin McGowan | 11 July 2011

If you are well-acquainted with Waka Flocka’s mixtape output, you were surprised when dude assembled one of the best front-to-back rap albums of last year. While doing a bit of research for this review, I revisited Flockaveli. It remains colossal, all towering Lex Luger beats, rhythmic yelps, and hooks thrown like lead bricks. I loved it, all 72 minutes of it. Flocka’s latest mixtape is 75 minutes and harder to love.

By nearly every conventional metric, Waka Flocka is a pretty miserable rapper. His bars have a tendency to, um, not rhyme; he doesn’t flow so much as scream words from a campfire in his throat; he knows not the concept of restraint or triteness. In defiance of the laws of the universe, like a rock perpetually hovering eight inches off the ground, he’s still a lot of fun to listen to. CMG colleague Chris Molnar described Flocka’s raps on Flockaveli as sounding as if they emanated from the mouth of God; here they just sound like they’re voiced by an angry alcoholic with a megaphone. Actually, DuFlocka Rant is essentially a Flocka-hosted 1017 Brick Squad tape, so it sounds like a wolfpack of angry alcoholics with megaphones. And Gucci Mane, who sounds like room temperature milk. Which is to say that DuFlocka can be entertaining, if tiresome over the course of an hour and fifteen minutes. The tape could be a tight, apoplectic 38 minutes, but Flocka doesn’t do “tight.”

So DuFlocka Rant possesses all the triumphs and warts one might imagine a Flocka record not produced by Lex Luger would. There are declarations both boring (“Waka Flocka Flame, you can call me Waka Kush”) and accidentally brilliant (“On to the next one, so Jay-Z”). There are burners like the slithering “Bickin’ Back Bein’ Bool,” which is nearly incoherent in its slang, but serves as the weed anthem around which the tape’s madness revolves. At one point, Flocka just starts comparing fictional women’s sexual talents to other fictional women’s sexual talents for kicks (“See Tisha fuck like Lisa / See Lisa fuck like Shonda…”), which is pretty abhorrent and lazy. Oh, and there’s auto-tune for some reason? Flocka decided he wanted to croon on a couple hooks, but even covered in electro-glitter, he’s still talking shit about being impossibly drunk and shooting people. Through all of this, Flocka remains kinetic and frenzied, working at too frantic a pace to censor or edit.

It’s a Waka Flocka Flame mixtape, which means those slogging through the muck of DatPiff will get momentarily excited, bang it for a week, cherrypick the best tracks, and dispose of the fat. We rap nerds are like the opposite of American Indians: we only use a couple parts of the animal, because the rest is fucking gross and deserves to rot. I’m positive Flocka is okay with this. To him, music is something that emerges from the speakers in dense bricks; listeners unhinge their jaws; and the digestive process does the rest of the work. I look forward to Flocka’s next tape: CarFlocka Anthony: A Bunch of Stuff I Literally Just Recorded Today.







:: myspace.com/wakaflockaflame