If you’ve heard any hits by Drake, the Canadian rapper-crooner who once played the wheelchair-bound high-schooler Jimmy Brooks on “Degrassi: The Next Generation” (and you have; they are ubiquitous), you know that hip hop now trades as much on sultry vulnerability as it does on self-assured brawn. Of course, Drake didn’t get there first: Eminem obsessed over his anger and impotence, and Kanye West’s hip-hop striving is dosed with insecurity. (Reach as deep or as far back as you like. Wasn’t the theme song for the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” about a Philly kid who couldn’t hang on the playground?) The flip side of rap’s macho posturing is all too tempting of a place to spelunk.
But not every rapper with a tender spot self-consciously shows it off. Some, like Young Buck, who has just released the mixtape “Live Loyal, Die Rich,” are street toughs who find themselves on the defensive. Jay-Z wasn’t referring to Buck when he rapped “sensitive thugs, you all need hugs,” in “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love),” but “sensitive thug” nicely sums him up.
Or more precisely, sums up his image. Young Buck was once merely an up-and-coming thug, plucked from Nashville, Tennessee to join 50 Cent’s G-Unit group. His gruff, appealing G-Unit debut, “Straight Out of Ca$hville,” broke the Billboard 200’s top five and delivered two minor hits, including the irresistibly slinky, sleazy “Shorty Wanna Ride.” Young Buck proved an eager acolyte of 50 Cent and his crew; he was arrested after the 2004 Vibe Awards for allegedly stabbing a man who had punched 50’s mentor Dr. Dre. But Buck not only found disagreement with 50 Cent’s enemies, including G-Unit exile the Game, but eventually, 50 Cent himself. As a result, 50 released a recording of what he said was Buck weeping during a telephone call, and dismissed him from his group. Buck later filed for bankruptcy. When Nah Right posted the new mixtape, it was greeted with comments like, “Oh the fuckin irony, lmao *doesn’t download*.”
“Live Loyal, Die Rich” is Young Buck’s first mixtape since late 2010. (He has said he plans to release three more this year.) He’s not overtly sensitive here — although on “21 & Up,” a highlight, he does betray a certain gentility, telling a young woman he’s waiting for her 21st birthday before pursuing her. As opposed, that is, to settling for her 18th. But the delighted menace that suffused “Shorty Wanna Ride” isn’t much in evidence here. Buck, who raps over rolling, twilight-tinged beats, sounds less cocksure and controlled — and less like he’s trying to prove his worth. The album opens with “2nd Chance,” and Buck announcing, “Made a lotta money. I blew my whole advance. People stole from me, but now I understand: I want mo’ money, and I’m the fucking man. So I’m gonna make this bitch jump with my second chance.”
There isn’t much to those lines, lyrically. Buck’s just being blunt, announcing his freedom and his intention to make amends with his career. Contrast that against the abiding existential angst of another, more famously sensitive thug, the oft-ridiculed the Game, who after losing his spot in G-Unit has fascinatingly indulged all manner of defensive postures, tearful nostalgia, festering resentment, idol worship, and maybe especially, wounded pride (in his neighborhood, gang affiliations, cultural traditions, and so forth). The Game has probably made more of his various defeats then Buck, but it sometimes seems as if that’s what he was born to do. Young Buck had a fall, and you could do a lot worse than listen as he tries to stand back up.
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