David Banner: MTA2: Baptized In Dirty Water

The modern gangsta rapper is divided against himself: He seeks salvation but speeds toward damnation. He courts the widest audience, which he then harangues with insults and threats. He rails against the heartlessness of capitalism while celebrating his triumph over it through almost surreally conspicuous consumption. He denigrates gold-diggers' crass materialism while celebrating his own. He expresses angst and torment over inflicting violence one moment, and joyously celebrates murder the next. In the right hands, these contradictions make for riveting psychodrama. At worst, the tortured-thug sensibility is nothing more than a marketable persona, a dependable pose to which audiences have been conditioned to respond. Mississippi's David Banner, who rocketed to national stardom thanks to last year's Mississippi: The Album, embodies such contradictions. With a dirty-down Southern growl, Banner raps about wanting to do right but mostly doing wrong. He tries to follow the Lord's path, but in his eyes, at least, that road seems to involve regular trips to the strip club, where standout MTA2 tracks like "Pretty Pink" and the anthemic "Pop That" would feel right at home. Like a lot of Southern rappers, Banner is at his best when engaged in self-reflection or giving voice to his raging libido; it's the gangsta tracks that feel perfunctory. For example, "Mama's House," with its grim "stab that ho in the face" refrain, is sluggish, gratuitously violent, and boring, though it does contain an important message about stabbing hos in the face. Violence takes center stage on the album's most audacious track, albeit in a more constructive and imaginative way: "The Christmas Song" views the holiday through the hopelessness of the desperately poor. Remixes of "Like A Pimp" and "Airforce Ones" reek of commercial calculation–at 70 minutes, it's not like MTA2 needed the filler–but for the most part, Banner seems content to have the mainstream come to him. So far, his strategy has paid off, both commercially and creatively.