Memphis rapper Don Trip is one of hip-hop’s most fascinating and uncompromising figures right now. His breakthrough came in 2011 with “Letter 2 My Son,” a heartfelt and truly devastating rap about not being able to see his child as much as he wanted that bravely refused to entirely victimize Trip himself. The video went viral, showing Trip in the booth spitting out the lines with rage, sadness, and desperation. It was a captivating clip which fully displayed his most winning qualities: a searing kind of sincerity and the ability to merge off-the-cuff emotion with old fashioned freestyle skills. Not long after “Letter 2 My Son” blew up, a more radio-friendly version arrived that gave the song a soaring proper hook from Cee-Lo Green, whose work with Goodie Mob was a precedent for Trip’s folksy real talk, and whose “Fuck You” was one of the biggest songs in the country that year. It was an admirable nod to radio demands that barely negated the song’s power.
At the same time, Don Trip was working closely with Nashville spitter Starlito, a former Cash Money rookie who left the major label game behind for a doggedly independent route. The two released Step Brothers, a stellar tag-team tape of raw nerve, emotion and whirling, clever lyricism. You saw right there, Trip’s desire to simply do him, at all costs, and seemingly walk into a hit song. And this impressive, independent spirit only continued as Trip, like so many super-talented MCs, seems to get caught in limbo with the major labels who weren’t exactly sure what to do with a rapper who only wanted to play the popular rap game on his own terms.
And so, in that sense, Trip’s latest mixtape, Randy Savage, is another street rap thumbing of the nose to the major label system that had its next street hero (complete with a radio-ready single!), and still didn’t know what to do with the guy. It begins with Trip nodding to label drama on “Randy Savage Entrance”: “Bitch I’m back with a vengeance/ Spent three years in my lawyer’s office/ Fighting for my independence/ Boy that shit was expensive/ They left me hanging like lynching.” From there, it is the sound of a rapper unfettered, interested in entertaining only himself and his dedicated core: “Road Warriors” is an atmospheric middle finger featuring Starlito; a dead-eyed anthem of perseverance called “Cream of the Crop” and closer “Macho Madness” drip with confidence and rugged individualism.
At just 10 tracks and relying almost entirely on Trip’s brainy boasts and diary-like confessions and creative trap production, Randy Savage actually recalls the kind of regional major label record that would’ve seen release a decade or so ago. Appropriately, the only “big name” is Memphis hero turned radio rap superstar Juicy J, who is perhaps the number one example of just doing you for so long that eventually, the mainstream caves and comes to you. Perhaps that could be Don Trip’s role if he stays in his lane and maintains his integrity.
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