South Bronx product Fred The Godson has long been an additive to the list of New York artists like Joey Bada$$, Maino, Troy Ave who represent the epicenter of the East Coast bloc’s straightforward lyricism and boom bap standards of yore. Fred’s intentions are to have you listening closely with your head bopping to his street-core content and whimpering bars filled with intrepid punchlines instead of mindlessly “‘turning up” to gutteral, choppy Southern-inspired twangy vocal deliveries over booming 808s. Fred The Godson’s Contraband II is a sixteen-track mixtape that carves his space as one of The Big Apple’s most ambitious worms biting through to the core of the city’s ghetto topography.
From the “Intro,” the production team The Heatmakerz gives you a New Jack City and Nino Brown appeal with their beats that sound like a drug deal scene in the TV show Power. But the first cut makes you immediately wonder about the outcome with predictable preamble of his Fred’s mission to take over the streets. Yet the resounding bassline and triumphant keyboard stabs accompany the brief rant to set up the second song and title track of the mixtape. It continues to expose the influence of Jay Z with a “Blamesample” of Hov’s Reagonomics-scapegoating in his wordplay as the reason behind his drug-pitching past.
The mixtape ascends on the fourth track with “Ready to Start Pitchin” featuring New York contemporaries Joell Ortiz and Vado spitting venom over a beat another piano riff with a haunting bass groove and drums snares that sounds geocentric to the Five Boroughs’ hardcore rap soundscape circa 1997. The subject matter changes on the song titled with every rapper’s most overtired metaphor of the moment, “Steph Curry.” Fred takes Curry’s greatest asset quite literal, becoming a sex-crazed balladeer donning the moniker ‘Freddie Pendergrass’ to set the mood and let his threesome-coordination skills talk for him while crooner Mally Stakz serenades for the chorus. The bassline invokes a mellow vibe with R&B flavor, with relaxed handclaps, with crooner Mally Stakz’s serenading in the chorus. But it fails to serve as an aphrodisiac because the menage à tois stories in both verses seem like one big wet dream.
From thereon, Contraband II has peak moments with tracks in the explosive “Black Power” featuring Cocoa Sarai gracefully harmonizing their politically-charged offering and take on the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the freestyle fanatical “Picture Bars,” the “Rockabye Baby” with a Malcolm X speech sample to end the song on a black first-raised note, the Kevin Gates and Jim Jones-assisted “Kitchen Table,” “Nonfiction” with Tyler Woods, “What Goes Around” with LBS as they give their street testimonials over the seventies R&B vocal-looped chorus that brings you back to the sample era of the New York underground.
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But missteps such as the immediate skipper “John Q” featuring Future-clone Jaquae make you want to imagine the mixtape without the prerequisite Atlanta trap production attempt. “One Life” and “This Is It” (featuring Maino) also make the project somewhat uneven. Yet the amalgam of impressive one-liners and the solid production makes Fred The Godson’s latest mixtape fly with broken wings, as the sex, drugs, politics, and money topics serving as the feathers, keeping him at a median latitude.
