Album: “The Real Testament”
PLIES
“The Real Testament”
(Slip-N-Slide/Atlantic)
Listeners who only know the rapper Plies from his current hit, “Shawty,” might be shocked — happily shocked, one hopes — by his debut album. Like so many songs on the radio “Shawty” is built around a toothsome refrain by the R&B cyborg known as T-Pain. But between those choruses lurks a marvelously uncouth rapper. At a time when hip-hop is dominated by cheerful dance tracks and gooey love songs, Plies is a welcome anomaly: a foulmouthed, streetwise storyteller who seems eager to spoil hip-hop’s good mood. (And not a moment too soon.)
Plies (who pronounces his rap name like “pliers,” more or less) comes from Fort Myers, Fla., and he earned himself an eager underground following with a series of mixtapes. Last year he proved that, contrary to conventional wisdom, legal problems don’t actually help rappers’ careers. After a nightclub shooting, he was charged with illegal possession of a concealed weapon; in the aftermath he was replaced by Snoop Dogg on an Akon collaboration called, “I Wanna Love You,” which turned out to be a big hit.
Now, after a series of delays, comes “The Real Testament,” Plies’s major-label debut, which sounds about as raw as his mixtapes. He uses a common racial epithet nonstop, and sometimes he uses a less common one too; the second song, “100 Yrs,” is an attack on unscrupulous “crackers” who press for excessive prison sentences. In Plies’s deep-Florida drawl and elastic approach to meter you might hear an echo of the gruff Miami rapper Trick Daddy. But Plies’s reedy voice and hotblooded temperament give these songs a power all their own, whether he’s taunting a probation officer or apologizing to his mother.
No doubt the Atlantic executives are most excited about “Hypnotized,” a brisk and breezy Akon collaboration that may well find a home on the pop charts. But the album also includes a slow and woozy revenge track (“Goons Lurkin”), as well as “1 Mo Time,” in which Plies tries a notably unsentimental approach to seduction. Addressing the girlfriend who’s leaving him, he admits he cheated and concedes it’s over, but wonders whether the couple might take a final stroll down memory lane. It’s a crude request, but not an unfriendly one; he knows that sometimes, it pays to be impolite.
KELEFA SANNEH
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