“I’m balling till my very last breath,” Ross intones on a paranoid banger called “Last Breath.” Get rich, and die trying to keep jealous haters from dipping into your wealth. “I am flawed, it may not seem that way, but I am,” Ross acknowledges only one track in, on the Mike Tyson-sampling “High Definition,” and he’s not just using clever imagery when he compares his necklace to a guillotine. It’s no stretch to find traces of Ross’s brush with mortality on this album-quality mixtape, though they’re admittedly - what’s this? - kind of subtle. Rich Forever also comes after a year when Ross suffered seizures, in a rare and highly public instance of vulnerability for the infamously unflappable MC. Rozay: “It’s time to take you to the other side / The side you gotta watch A&E cable television for, homey.” His ridiculousness has become only more intricate, evolving beyond Jeezy’s street-cred rawness to something, well, deeper. He doesn’t just describe his gun, he tells us his urine is on it. The Bawse doesn’t just talk about his wealth, he compares it to that of music’s other Boss. Excess is all over the 20-track, hour-plus mixtape, from the high-profile guests (Diddy, Drake, Nas, Kelly Rowland, Pharrell, John Legend) and Ross’s in-house producers (Beat Billionaire, Justice League, the Inkredibles - only one Lex Luger joint!) to, of course, the lyrical content. Ross’s latest mixtape, the diabolical Rich Forever, at first might appear to be more of the same. He effectively rendered fellow drug-trade hip-hop motivational grunter Young Jeezy irrelevant. He makes illicit wealth sound not only luxurious - as his Maybach Music label’s Mercedes-referencing moniker underscores - but fun. Over the last couple of albums, 2009’s Deeper Than Rap and 2010’s especially triumphant Teflon Don, the Miami rapper has made everyone forget about his prison-guard perfect attendance record by mastering the role of the gruff, villainous drug lord.
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