The team-up between two West Coast rappers suggests an inspired combination, but it pays off only in intermittent bursts.
There are times on *Kommunity Service—*which pairs the Compton-bred YG with Mozzy, the dizzyingly prolific rapper from Sacramento—that the duo sounds wonderfully intertwined: finishing one another’s thoughts on hooks, sharing space in verses, Mozzy’s voice coiled around YG’s doubled ad-libs. Taut at its start and frustratingly indistinct near its middle, the album suggests an inspired combination, but it pays off only in intermittent bursts.
Kommunity Service runs just 28 minutes, and its songs take the same shape in miniature. With one exception, they’re in full swing within 10 seconds, and none reach the three-and-a-half minute mark. And so, when the album works—as on its far superior front half—it evokes the same feelings as a smart, seedy DJ set (its release is well-timed to nationwide strip club reopenings.) This is never truer than at the very beginning, when a quick four-count gives way to an audacious flip of “Wanksta” and Mozzy interpolating 50 Cent’s flow. And G Herbo’s inclusion on the subsequent song, “Dangerous,” is especially shrewd: The Chicago rapper works so well at faster tempos that his vocal alone seems to propel the record forward.
Despite its brevity and that breathless opening run, the album is poorly paced. The Herbo feature is followed soon after by the slinking “MAD,” which features Young M.A and seems handmade for the New Yorker, down to its slightly lower BPM, and “Vibe With You,” with Ty Dolla $ign vocals silky enough to soften a YG verse that boils down, very literally, to “I fuck with you.” That trio of collaborations, plus the “Wanksta” flip and the irresistibly sinister “Bompton to Oak Park,” comprise the A-side and are diminished severely by what follows: a sullen cut plagued by a regrettable A Boogie hook; Tyga on his bottle service autopilot; and a posse cut where all five rappers operate on shootaround half-speed.
That losing streak is finally snapped by the penultimate track, “Bite Down,” the one here that sounds most like it was pulled from Mozzy’s hard drive. It has all the hallmarks of his best work: melancholy major-key piano, a verse that lurches from the spiritual to the uncomfortably corporeal, mid-period 2Pac without the world domination bent. The song, complete with Mozzy’s charming, slightly atonal hook, is superb despite a YG verse that is merely OK; a mild disappointment considering that some of YG’s best writing comes when it sounds as if he’s trying to slot neatly onto Mozzy albums. In fact, while the production frequently reminds more of Mozzy’s LPs than YG’s Def Jam affairs, there is little of the paranoia that the latter so often mine to chilling effect, and which would seem to be squarely in Mozzy’s wheelhouse.
It is almost never wise to draw too many conclusions from a record’s cover—in this instance a wonderful recreation of one of the posters for Belly, the 1998 movie that stars Nas and DMX. But there are echos: the contemporaries and creative equals with wildly disparate national profiles, whose public personas would suggest music far different from one another’s but who are actually at their best when orbiting the other’s supposed territory. While Kommunity Service only hints at what a true synthesis of those artists could be, at times the implication is enough.
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