Crass, materialistic, vacuous: Rick Ross drops the perfect recession album

Rappers also, you know, need to sound good, and the bad news for Ross is that his voice is about as unappealing as his body: a wheezing, heaving bellow with all the deftness of a sledgehammer. On his last album, the ridiculously successful “Trilla,” Ross rapped like a monster truck carving its way through an obstacle course. It was a rare thing — an album that succeeded in spite of its star.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Ross was recently exposed as a corrections officer, a revelation that, rather amusingly, rocked the contemporary rap world to its foundations. After pictures of the rapper in uniform surfaced on the internet last summer, Ross repeatedly denied their authenticity, letting rip with caustic diatribes like, “Fake pictures are created by the fake, meant to entertain the fake.” But as the evidence became overwhelming, Ross was forced to bite his words and admit that he had worked in a Florida prison during the 1990s. The fact that Ross models himself on legendary drug trafficker “Freeway” Ricky Ross made the story particularly humiliating, and the affair reached its absurd pinnacle when his lawyer let slip that the rapper had actually never sold drugs or worked in a gang. Fake images are created by the fake, meant to entertain the fake? Oh, the irony.

So “Deeper than Rap” is actually a surprisingly apt title for the portly emcee’s third album. With anyone else on the mic, it would sound like just another boast in a genre founded on braggadocio, but for Ross, this is the chance to prove that he’s more than a desperate poser. And the good news? He doesn’t back down a bit. No apologies here, folks, no heart-on-sleeve tearjerkers either — “Deeper than Rap” is the most gloriously hedonistic rap album of the year so far, and that’s saying something.

From the wildly overblown cover art, framing Ross as a modern-day Scarface, to songs with names like “Rich Off Cocaine” and “Mafia Music,” Ross exposes the facade of rap music and revels in it. After all, if anyone can play with these stereotypes, it’s him, and on “Deeper than Rap” Ross dives into the role with the zeal of a hip-hop Daniel Day-Lewis. Hearing him rap things like “Never had a gun and badge / Back in the day I sold crack” is almost as much fun as watching Day-Lewis chew up scenery in “There Will Be Blood,” because you know they’re both acting — and they know you know.

It doesn’t hurt that Ross has turned into a nimbler, more elastic lyricist. On the gleaming, futuristic “All I Really Want,” Ross pulls off an internal rhyme scheme within the first 10 seconds, and on “Usual Suspects,” he holds his own next to Nas, which is no small feat. And even when Ross is unable to keep up with his own elaborate rhymes — which is quite a lot of the time — that’s half the fun. Hearing him strain to deliver incomprehensible tongue-twisters like “Kill all the middle men / I’m the militant Gilligan / speaking Creole and gentlemen as I cruise the Caribbean” is kind of like watching an elephant jumping through hoops — as uncomfortable as it is entertaining. The same goes for the man’s frequent lyrical hiccups, my personal favorite being the utterly bizarre imagery of “Fuck them all / they sweat from my balls.”

Thankfully, Ross knows better than to present himself as an artiste, and unlike most rappers he never brags about his skill on the mic. Being rich, sure, getting it on, OK, but being talented, not so much — and it’s a self-awareness that makes his mammoth clumsiness all the more endearing.

As with all of Ross’ albums though, the lyrics aren’t really the point, and half the time you can’t understand what he’s saying anyway. It’s the production that keeps him going, and “Deeper than Rap” is easily the most musically accomplished record of the rapper’s career. No wonder Ross named his record label, “Maybach Music,” after a $500,000 luxury car — the music here glistens like a Bentley fresh out the shop, swirling with sugar-sweet vocal samples and rumbling, primordial synthesizers.

And lest we forget, the true artist isn’t the name on the cover, but the incomprehensible misspellings in the fine print: producers like the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, the Inkredibles and the Runners, who handed Ross his first certified hit in 2006 with the booming, bass-heavy screw of “Hustlin’.” All three producers weigh in heavily on the track listing, creating an album that gleams like polished gold. It’s the kind of music that doesn’t even need videos — listening to the airy synths and plastic saxophone solos of “Maybach Music 2,” you can almost picture Miami Beach. “Escapism” isn’t a strong enough word for it; this is music that refuses to deal in anything but fantasy and projection, and party-poopers like “reality” are nowhere to be found.

You might disagree with me then, but sitting here listening to songs like “Yacht Club” and “Cigar Music,” I think “Deeper than Rap” might be the perfect recession record — perfect, that is, because it’s so wildly, obnoxiously inappropriate. Who wants reality, anyway? “Deeper than Rap” is the musical equivalent of a summer blockbuster, transporting listeners into a sun-bleached fantasy world where, in Jay-Z’s immortal words, “money ain’t a thang.”

Like Jay-Z, Ross knows this is an ephemeral dream, and you can tell precisely because he never admits it — and thank the Lord, because the album wouldn’t be half as much fun if he did. “My money long / my money strong / if you ain’t getting money that mean you done something wrong,” brags Ross in the album’s opening minutes, and it’s a line he reprises throughout the record under a million different guises. On “Deeper than Rap,” Rick Ross is doing pretty much everything right — he deserves every cent coming to him.