T.I. abandons talent for 'Trail' of bland hits

And yet, as disappointing as "T.I. Vs. T.I.P." was, it's nowhere near as bad as the rapper's latest album, "Paper Trail." Like its predecessor, "Paper Trail" also has schizophrenia as its theme, but it chronicles something much more disturbing: the tooth-and-nail fight between T.I., the hardcore Southern emcee, and T.I., the fluffy pop-rap sell-out. It's a conflict that tears the album apart and leaves a big question mark over the rapper's future. On one side, we have the T.I. we know and love: magnetic, caramel drawl, rhythmically inventive delivery, witty lyrics and thuggish aggression. On the other side, and sadly, easily winning the battle on "Paper Trail," is T.I. the pop sell-out, jumping into bed with every mainstream singer there is. Rihanna! Justin Timberlake! Kanye! Usher! Yay!

If you feel like you haven't heard enough of Rihanna or J.T. this year - in which case you've probably been living in a sound-proof box somewhere on Mars - then "Paper Trail" is going to be exactly your kind of thing. It stands as a good summary of contemporary pop music, which, in my view at least, is one big fat orgy. Sure, people have always said "all pop sounds the same," but that phrase has never rung truer than it does today because all pop quite literally is the same. Look at the charts, and you see the same producers, the same singers and even the same samples, drum machines and synthesizers. It's what I call the "Timbaland effect," and it is crushing pop music's inventiveness, steamrolling everything in sight, from rock to R&B to rap.

And yet, I've never heard any album that sounds quite as anonymous as "Paper Trail." Closer "Dead and Gone," a Timba-bland attempt at an anthem with a whiny Justin Timberlake chorus, is a lazy carbon copy of Madonna's "Four Minutes"; "Whatever You Like," with its bleeping, robot synths and lazy auto-tune singing, sounds exactly like Lil' Wayne's "Lollipop"; and the list goes on endlessly, from the monotonous horn-filled "Swing Ya Rag," which sounds like a parody of bad southern rap, to the Usher-led "My Life Your Entertainment," which aims for Lupe Fiasco's "Superstar" but sounds more like a commercial for Us Weekly. Still, nothing on the album can prepare you for the mind-blowing, life-changing awfulness of second single "Live Your Life." It's a song so bad - or, to be accurate, so baffling - that I have to set up a bit of context before I talk about it.

Two years ago, T.I. wouldn't be caught dead with a mainstream rapper, let alone a mainstream singer: "King" and every album before it were defined by T.I.'s stubborn refusal to sell out. He usually rapped choruses himself and more often than not filled his guest-list with the creme de la creme of Southern emcees. Fast forward to 2008 and "Live Your Life," and try to picture the shock and uncontrollable horror I felt when the song opened with a sample from Romanian pop song "Dragostea din Tei," or "that Mayehi, Mayeha" song." Yes, that's right! And that's not all: The sample is repeated again and again, with Rihanna singing a skewed cover version at the same time - except instead of "Mayehi, Mayeha" it's "fancy clothes, fancy car-ar." To give you some idea of how far things have come, how low standards have dropped, I see this as the equivalent of 2Pac collaborating with the Spice Girls, or Wu-Tang Clan deciding to feature Britney Spears on one of their songs doing a cover of "My Heart Will Go On." It is just ... utterly, utterly baffling.

To be fair, the album does have a handful of noteworthy tracks. Even though "I'm Illy" sounds exactly like Lil' Wayne and could be his hit song "A Milli," if you say the title fast enough, it's one of the few tracks with an ounce of menace to it. The same can be said of the sneering putdown of "What Up, What's Haapnin," which magnifies T.I.'s trademark drawl to near-parodic levels. Even better is the empowerment anthem "No Matter What," which is easily one of the best songs of the rapper's career. Humble and blisteringly confident at the same time, the track sees T.I. open up with startling emotional honesty, rapping at the song's peak "I lost my partner and my daughter in the same year / Somehow I rise above my problems and remain here." It helps, too, that the song's intensely personal lyrics are matched by the best production on "Paper Trail" - a rocking, strutting blaze of synths, guitars and strings, courtesy of Timbaland-protege Danja.

On the whole though, "Paper Trail" is a fiasco, a disheartening confirmation that the lines between rap and pop have become too blurred to distinguish anymore. T.I. claims that "Paper Trail" was named after all the sheets of paper he used to write his lyrics, but I think he named it after something else: the stream of cash he's desperately chasing after, hands outstretched, eyes with dollar signs in them. On certain parts of "Paper Trail," there are hints of the credible T.I., of the charismatic, magnetic emcee who was instrumental in bringing international success to Southern rap. But it's clear which T.I. has won the battle on "Paper Trail" as a whole: It's the sell-out, obnoxiously rapping about private jets on "On Top of the World," declaring that he can "drop Bentleys" anytime on "Whatever You Like," and proudly announcing how good he is at stacking cash on the album's intro. As underground rap duo Binary Star once rapped: "Everything that glitters ain't gold / And every gold record don't glitter that's for damn sure."

2 out of 5

Pros: A couple of strong tracks, particularly the raw, emotional anthem "No Matter What." And even on a bad album like this, T.I.'s languid, sneering drawl remains one of the most idiosyncratic voices in contemporary music.

Cons: T.I. sells out, stacks of cash in both hands - Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Usher! The only person he doesn't seem to have in his phone book is Britney. "Paper Trail" is yet another confirmation that rap is pop, and pop is rap, and we should all just get used to it.