“I’d sell a brick and put blues in my pocket/Now they talking digital money and wallets,” he says, sounding like he’s talking to a friend after being pitched in his label office by 20-year-old tech bros.įortunately, Gotti doesn’t flow like an old guy. Gotti describes seeing dealers getting paid via money apps and being pulled into meetings about the metaverse. On “Crypto,” the 40-year-old sounds half intrigued, half baffled by digital currencies and other new tech (and this is the guy, by the way, who knows the benefits of a slick DM slide). Principally, Gotti can’t hide that he’s getting older.
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But it would be wrong to say that CM10: Free Game plays like a 2008 record that fell through a crack in time and landed in modern day. If the narratives are familiar, so are the beats: There are creeping, bass-heavy trap rattlers and soul loops that owe a debt to Just Blaze and early Kanye West. When he drops a line like, “Mama pray for me, help me with this anger,” in the middle of “Palm Trees in Memphis,” I want him to pull at that thread further and put more of himself in the song. It would be nice if he delved deeper, if only a little more often. But his brooding is brief, and he quickly moves to an accounting of the pleasures that make up his present opulence: Dior threads, a house that feels like a hotel, a garage comparable to a stable with “a lot of horses.” Gotti’s modus operandi is to pepper listeners with surface-level references to hustling and wealth. So you get a song like “Palm Trees in Memphis,” where Gotti recalls memories of childhood poverty over a sumptuous soul sample from producer STREETRUNNER. Gotti’s still live from the kitchen, cooking bricks over a stove, “making that pot go do the beatbox.” There’s little tension because CM10: Free Game swerves colder portraits of a dealer’s life, keeping the viewfinder firmly on the benefits. This suggests a duality to the two sets, but any thematic disparity is basically undetectable. On the artwork accompanying Side B, he’s kitted out in some of his sharpest formal wear. The cover of Side A features a topless Gotti wearing sagging pants and a clean hat and kicks. Instead, it dropped to streaming services in two halves. In old times, CM10: Free Game would simply be a double album.