Better Than Yours: When Worlds Collide

I tweet about it sometimes, I blog about it even less regularly, and I discuss it with few people because most of my friends don't like rap music: I am a big G-Side fan. The dudes rap with this heartfelt honesty, their production collaborators are creative and daring. That's a good combination. G-Side also defies easy labels. Their voices sound southern, and their first album had a southern aesthetic, but they really don't resemble regional brethren in more ways than they do. G-Side is not my favorite rap group, and their songs may not be "the best" by objective measurements (if they exists), but they might be the most interesting. I listen to G-Side all the time.

I also don't got a day without some Gangsta Gibbs. Like everyone else, I am totally in the tank for Freddie. His rapping is precise, forceful, and entrancing. He also is proving to be an artistic entrepreneur, finding different beats and opportunities that steadily cultivate his mystique while also expanding his range. That growth is something one might project backwards as his early music finds an audience, and that's the case with "It's All Cognac." Gibbs on a soul beat isn't groundbreaking, yet "Cognac" sounds mature all the same because Gibbs is just that good.

And so it is that despite my love of Hunstville's finest MCs, I must concede that Gangsta Gibbs did more with this shared beat, in part because he used it less. G-Side's "This Is Life" is a representative G-Side track, sweeping strings and full sound accommodating rhymes about aspiration and reality. (The video's unrefined production quality is also characteristic G-Side, and that's both a little hokey and a lot endearing.) It holds nothing back; the group earns my admiration for its passion. "Cognac," meanwhile, more judiciously puts those strings to work, opting to structure a majority of the song as an ever ascending loop and leaving a few flourishes as the mountaintop of which we only receive a glimpse. It suits Freddie, whose persona is a ruthless and less feeling one than G-Side's disarming, earnest pouring forth.

Freddie Gibbs, "It's All Cognac"


G-Side, "This Is Life"