MMG is a rap label whose most successful chart performance of the past couple of years has come from the singer Omarion. Gunplay, the squad’s wild-card muscle, has struggled with drug addiction and failed to release music with any consistency since 2012. Cole, now finds himself marginalized on all fronts, the occasional, generic R&B crossover record notwithstanding. Wale, once a college-crowd favorite in the same class as his friend (turned frenemy) J. Meek Mill may never fully recover from his ill-advised feud with Drake.
As it stands now, however, Maybach Music Group is hip-hop’s Ottoman Empire - a once-formidable power plagued by great miscalculations, overreach, incoherence, and bad luck. The fantasy was sustainable for much longer than Ross’s many detractors and fact checkers ever thought possible. Rick Ross is the richest man on the planet. It’s bullshit, of course: Who cares? If there is a single virtue that American creators and critics overvalue in all lanes of entertainment - music, literature, TV, film - it is realism. I dare anyone to identify a rapper who conveys wealth so wildly. There’s a song on here called “Triple Platinum,” on which Rick Ross, a musician who, for the record, has only barely platinum album, lists more than a dozen achievements of luxury consumption (“Versace drawers,” “forty cars,” “double Rs,” etc.) that bestow upon him the confidence of a rapper (such as Nicki Minaj) who has actually gone triple platinum.
The track list of his latest album, Rather You Than Me - out Friday - is a litany of classic hip-hop luxury lingo (“Dead Presidents”), Illuminati-core buzzwords (“Scientology,” “Powers That Be”), and first-class Mad Libs (“Santorini Greece”). Rick Ross, on the other hand, associates himself with wealth by characterizing it very effectively, and obsessively, in every last cranny of his songs and marketing, down to his song titles. Plus, Kanye married into the Kardashian clan and is thus - unlike most other rappers - credibly rich. Kanye West albums sound expensive, but in a markedly different sense his songs are all overproduced, and in many cases (such as “Otis”) Kanye makes a point of sampling popular music with prohibitively expensive clearance fees. He’s scathing, and he’s funny, especially in interviews, but flaunting wealth is Rick Ross’s dominant posture - his forte, his own, personal genre. That’s maybe the most broad and basic observation you could make about his music, and about the guy himself, since Ross speaks in grandiose bootstrap platitudes and affected earnings-call English.
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