Real Talk Ent.
3.0 out of 5
3.0 out of 5
Leslie Pridgen is really smart. His music is really ghetto. I mean most of these beats sound like they were rigged up by a friend of a friend in his basement studio while he was eating a Stouffer's chicken dinner with his work shirt on. It's calculated really, but the calculations are so right on you just kind of have to nod in agreement. Freeway has nothing. The mainstream audience he once courted - on Jay-Z's The Dynasty and the first Philadelphia Freeway album - chewed him up, shat him out and never looked back. At this point, you probably have uncles with more bank than him. So what does he do? He calls the Stouffer's guy, that's what. And then he gets back to work.
Philadelphia Freeway 2 is kind of a misnomer. Free's third album, financed by pseudo-shady, bottom-of-the-barrel distributors Real Talk Entertainment, doesn't really sound anything like its predecessor, which had more production credits from one-time tag-team Just Blaze and Kanye West than The Blueprint. Those guys have abandoned him, and it's true that the album suffers in some ways from their absence. In other ways, though, Freeway's resilience almost makes it all work out. He's as focused as ever, and wisely targets this batch of songs at both gangsters and academics who are sympathetic to motifs of ghetto glory.
There are tracks here called "Crack Rap," "Murda Music" and "The Nation," and the majority of them have enough charisma and D.I.Y. potency to warrant repeated listens. "Saddam Hussein of the rap game/ gotz to be the bomb!" goes the thug-motivational chorus of "Gotz 2 be tha Bomb." And like fellow underdog Ghostface Killah, his vocals have such a go-for-broke vitality it sounds like someone's gonna literally cut his lights off if he stops flowing.
Free was never going to be big like his mentor Jay-Z, or 50 Cent for that matter, whom he partnered with on 2007's superior comeback album Free At Last. As he himself once observed, he's simply too gutter. But even when the majority of his B and C level peers are failing and falling away, Freeway keeps working. From the sound of it, it's clear he's got more left to give.
- Reggie Ugwu
Philadelphia Freeway 2 is kind of a misnomer. Free's third album, financed by pseudo-shady, bottom-of-the-barrel distributors Real Talk Entertainment, doesn't really sound anything like its predecessor, which had more production credits from one-time tag-team Just Blaze and Kanye West than The Blueprint. Those guys have abandoned him, and it's true that the album suffers in some ways from their absence. In other ways, though, Freeway's resilience almost makes it all work out. He's as focused as ever, and wisely targets this batch of songs at both gangsters and academics who are sympathetic to motifs of ghetto glory.
There are tracks here called "Crack Rap," "Murda Music" and "The Nation," and the majority of them have enough charisma and D.I.Y. potency to warrant repeated listens. "Saddam Hussein of the rap game/ gotz to be the bomb!" goes the thug-motivational chorus of "Gotz 2 be tha Bomb." And like fellow underdog Ghostface Killah, his vocals have such a go-for-broke vitality it sounds like someone's gonna literally cut his lights off if he stops flowing.
Free was never going to be big like his mentor Jay-Z, or 50 Cent for that matter, whom he partnered with on 2007's superior comeback album Free At Last. As he himself once observed, he's simply too gutter. But even when the majority of his B and C level peers are failing and falling away, Freeway keeps working. From the sound of it, it's clear he's got more left to give.
- Reggie Ugwu
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