First & Fifteenth is a column by the Los Angeles-based critic Paul Thompson, who reviews new and notable rap music twice a month for Audiomack World.

Cam’ron & A-Trak – U Wasn’t There

Like Guru said, it’s mostly the voice. There are stretches of U Wasn’t There, the record that arrived last week in lieu of Cam’ron and A-Trak’s long-promised collaborative EP, Federal Reserve, where the Harlem legend writes with the wit, technical acuity, and selective transparency that made him, at his peak, one of the most magnetic, most singular rappers in the history of the form. You’re invited to imagine strips of flypaper dangling from the ceiling of his childhood apartment; you’re introduced to Big L and the person who “supposedly killed him”—both neighbors. His adolescent dreams of basketball stardom get blotted out by the drug trade, that whole painful lurch into adulthood collapsed into beautifully economic couplets like “Fast forward: Fort Lee, New Jersey, my triplex / Son just born, formula by the Pyrex.”

But where Cam has often sounded effortless, unflappable, he sounds at many points on U Wasn’t There disengaged. For years, his telegraphed internal rhymes and dips into onomatopoeia have given his verses, even ones with credible murder threats, a sort of nursery rhyme quality. (He’s leaned into this, to great effect. From 2009’s “Get It In Ohio”: White coke, tan dope, black gun, trey deuce / Silver bullets, purple piff, blue pills, Grey Goose / Pull out the rat-tat-tat, duck duck, say ‘goose’ / Beige coupe, suede roofs, send him off to Jesus.”) This latest voice, blunted to the point of being narcotized, recasts too many verses as party tricks, a feeling that is only compounded when Cam starts recounting his famous public appearances.

There is, fortunately, a clarifying contrast to be drawn from “Ghetto Prophets.” That song’s chorus comes courtesy of Conway the Machine, the Buffalo rapper who co-founded Griselda Records and, with his partners in that venture, has become a reliable dispenser of street rap that is at its core revivalist but remains plenty irreverent. The turn-of-the-century street rap Griselda evokes gets dotted with references to luxury goods (here, Conway brags about having shoes in not one, but “two new Virgil colorways”), but Cam himself feels like haute couture. The characters he sketches—in this case, a woman whose performance he gives a stingy C+—have detail and legitimate gripes, the enemies he renders get shot while Cam is still “in my pajamas.” If the world Conway et al. write about is rife with hardship, danger, and intermittent material escapes from it, Cam occupies its funhouse inversion, where the stick-ups are gleeful and the worst fate is to be vaguely bored.

22Gz feat. Shawny Binladen – "Max Out"

The notion of “influence” is frequently misunderstood and misapplied when it comes to tracing the spread of styles in rap, through cities or across the internet, and in any case has never been a precise measure of aesthetic success. But it might be the most interesting lens through which to view 22Gz. The Flatbush rapper’s 2016 single “Suburban” was a key inflection point in the importation of drill music from Chicago to New York, but he quickly fell away from New York drill’s cutting edge—in part because he spent most of 2017 in a Miami jail on charges that were eventually dropped—and his records began to seem imitative of peers who had blown past him, all competing to make minor tweaks in the source code of a genre that had been lifted from the Midwest and filtered through laptops in London.

“Max Out,” his new single, is this arc in microcosm. It comes alive halfway through, when Shawny Binladen—the Queens rapper whose own work favors the novelty sample flips that have taken over a corner of New York’s drill scene—drops in for a brief verse, with almost every line punched in over the last so that the eight bars come to seem like thoughts competing for space in his own head.

The single was released shortly before 22Gz and two of those peers, Sha Ek and Ron Suno, were removed from the bill at the New York edition of Rolling Loud at the request of the NYPD. Last year, Fetty Wap was arrested by federal agents shortly before his set at the festival. Two years prior to that, five drill artists, including 22Gz, were banned from playing, again at the urging of local cops. New York’s mayor, the former police captain Eric Adams, earlier this year said that drill music should be censored online, claiming it was the cause of gun violence in the city. The ongoing Rolling Loud fiascos are perhaps too tidy a metaphor for the way corporate interests leech rap music for whatever money it can provide them before dispensing with the humans who make it.

Cam'ron, A-Trak & 22Gz: First & Fifteenth