Freddie Gibbs Says He is As Huge As Whitney Houston and Luther Vandross

Freddie Gibbs is “The Mack” of hip-hop — hunched over a grand piano, two ice cubes in his quaint, white costume shirt unbuttoned to his torso, Huge Boss Rabbit chain glistening throughout his neck. Barely off-tune on objective, he croons traditional soul songs, from The Jackson 5’s “One Extra Probability” to Stan Smith’s “Keep With Me” to TLC’s “Waterfalls,” however there’s one exception: he wrote them. “Oooh, child give me yet another probability” transforms into “Oooh, child give me yet another gram,” as Gibbs offers them the Freddie Corleone treatment.

In tandem with the emergence of Blaxploitation movies within the early Nineteen Seventies, artists among the many likes of Richard Pryor and Ron O’Neal have lent their hand because the comedic aid to tales of pimps and gangsters, dealing crack to their respective communities. Freddie desires you to ask your self: “Is it leisure or is it an autobiography?” Blurring the road between reality and fiction, “Soul Bought Individually” finds Freddie Gibbs on the Kane Practice as soon as once more, working hijinks, opening hearth and promoting cocaine on the $$$ On line casino.

On the age of 40, the Gary, Indiana-native is recent off of his 2021 Grammy nomination for the critically-acclaimed collaborative undertaking, “Alfredo,” with The Alchemist. After years of buzz from his tasks with Madlib, “Piñata and Bandana,” Gibbs’ profession has taken off exponentially with the help of cult-classic producers. As he tells Selection: “I needed this album to be a end result of all of the dangers I took.”

The inspiration for “Soul Bought Individually” had been festering inside Freddie Gibbs since he was born. His father is a present member of the Chi-Lites and his mom helped elevate him with that very same appreciation for soul music. Though he solely grew up about 30 miles away from Chicago, Gibbs relates extra to Detroit and its alluring fashion of R&B. Freddie cites the ballads of: “Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, [and] the entire Motown period,” as driving forces behind his love for the style — a style that Gibbs sees as indistinguishable from hip-hop. “That’s the fiber of our music,” Gibbs remembers, considering again to the rising perception that R&B is a dying style. He provides plainly: “There ain’t no rap with out R&B or soul, interval.”

“Soul Bought Individually” isn’t only a end result of Freddie Gibbs’ profession and musical upbringing; it’s a collage of historically-Black genres fusing collectively to create a movie on wax, in the identical approach that Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack to “Superfly” can exist individually from the 1972 neo-noir crime movie that he scored. As Gibbs explains: “That’s the blueprint to a number of this rap shit. The ‘Superflys,’ the ‘Scarfaces,’ the ‘Black Caesars’ — these movies and people soundtracks and people themes gasoline a number of the road tradition we see in rap. I’m at all times wanting again at that shit for inspiration.”

Together with his signature, floppy-eared pink bunny rabbit on the duvet, wanting over a desert wasteland ridden with alien particles, “$$$ is Aliens meets ‘On line casino,’” as Gibbs places it. The $$$ On line casino is timeless; you’ll discover Three 6 Mafia-alumni, DJ Paul, flipping his personal traditional, “Pimpin’ & Robbin’” on “PSY,” you’ll hear James Blake’s eery soundscapes on “Darkish Hearted,” and also you’ll even get an opportunity to listen in on a voicemail from Jesus phoning Freddie Gibbs from the Appalachian Mountains making a plan to interrupt bread and light-weight up a blunt with the rapper on “Gold Rings.”

Similar to the inescapable Lotus On line casino within the “Percy Jackson & the Olympians” collection, there’s an ominous paranormal exercise that presents itself via Afrofuturism on the album. In the identical approach that “Nope” and “The Tougher They Fall” redefine historically white movie genres equivalent to Westerns and Sci-Fi, Gibbs reorients hip-hop to showcase how Midwestern cocaine rap could be simply as cinematic and omnific as its prog-rock and art-rock equivalents.

Maybe “Soul Bought Individually” is the prelude to Freddie Gibbs’ profession in soul; one final album to remind his listeners that 13 years within the music business has solely made him sharper. He factors out that having a technically flawless circulate, no matter how elaborate his rhyme scheme is, can solely go thus far. Freddie Gibbs is greater than only a hip-hop artist — he’s a rapper, a singer, a comic, an actor, and the record solely goes on and on. When it comes to vocalists, Gibbs sees himself amongst the greats: “It goes Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, after which me. I haven’t put these abilities on full show but, but it surely’s coming.” After years of teasing his followers with snippets of soul parodies, “Soul Bought Individually” is the top of Freddie Gibbs’ rap profession and solely the start of his path to changing into the following Rick James.