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Published:
Feb 09, 2017
Feb 09, 2017
I Decided. poses a question even before the first few seconds of its introduction, a rather trite skit with the sort of tone-setting instrumentals you’d expect from an arena-tour-ready album (spoiler alert, like 2015’s Dark Sky Paradise, this LP delivers the experience in bravado, braggadocio, et cetera). Sean misses his Grandma; I don’t mean to belittle what probably are earnest feelings which bled into the lyrical narrative of I Decided., but the Detroit rapper has more than earned his modifying prefix by now. The 'from nothing to something' narrative just isn’t as interesting as it was on Big Sean’s earlier albums, or mixtape. Moodily, he glares back at the listener from an opulent purple hued residence with the resilience you’d expect from a Finally Famous or Detroit Mixtape era Big Sean; not the one who owns (probably) that mansion with fancy cars in its driveway and a whole wardrobe of the gold chains he used to rap about wanting so badly.
While the narrative never quite satisfies the almost too self-serious nature of the question, Big Sean still presents an excellent album of top forty rap songs. I promise you the tour (beginning this spring) will undoubtedly include some of the star-studded players featured on I Decided., including Jeremih, Twenty88, or even Eminem (at least at their mutual hometown show), and what Sean may not always bring in substance, he brings in honest-to-god craftsmanship. The kid knows his way around syllables. Groan inducing as some of Big Sean’s bars may be, you’d be lying if you didn’t recognize that over his career improvement is obvious. Take, for example, “Moves,” or “Bounce Back,” the singles in advance of the record. Both these tracks bring the heat in ways familiar but Sean’s flow runs a little faster, his rhymes are a little more tight, and he crams in one or two more words per second than even the fastest verses on Dark Sky Paradise (although nothing on I Decided. even comes close to the urgency of the album’s secret weapon: “Paradise”).
It’s the album’s slow jams that deserve the most attention. Following Kanye, Frank Ocean, and Chance the Rapper, Sean spends a majority of I Decided. paying a more subtle homage to Detroit’s “Motown” lineage than naming a song after one of the city’s most sacred sons. He’ll lose fans over simmering ballads like “Jump Out the Window,” “Light,” or “Bigger Than Me.” He’ll gain them back with Migos-featuring “Sacrifices.”
It's exciting to see Big Sean’s style change, even if by inches; he’s an artist whose whole narrative is built up around mythologizing his own self reliance, the his-way-or-the-highway come up story. On I Decided. we see a guy who has, by all rights, ‘made it’ rapping about working so hard to make it; in that way something is lost in the message that doesn’t make sense. Because again, there’s a moment on the record where Big Sean absolutely bodies Eminem in the worst verse Shady's ever committed to tape (on one of the album's best tracks otherwise). I think we can say Sean’s more than made it.
Big Sean doesn't have much more to go up, as far as the rapper's story goes. He did make it. The bootstraps he'd lift himself up by are, deservedly so, made of gold. Maybe his next piece will mirror the self-love fest of Watch The Throne. We can hope, right?
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