Gadsden, AL’s Yelawolf can’t be easily mentioned without the phrase “white rapper” following within the same breath, but he’s making his big splash, his name popping up on YouTube channels, his mixtapes surrounded by buzz and such, so that’s what hipped me to Radioactive, his first official album release through Eminem’s record label Shady Records. The album is already carrying a Source Magazine rating that’s half a mic shy of “totally a stone-cold classic,” so I was expecting something special.
While Radioactive falls quite shy of anything approaching classic, it’s the equivalent of an enjoyable hot meal where it is no question -- of course I want seconds. It’s a solid debut from a smart, clear talent who’s still trying to find his niche and his sound but having fun in the process and getting so in-your-face you can smell the bongwater. Radioactive neatly fits into the template of a first album by a hyped new rapper. It’s about four songs too long, its focus falls unevenly between radio-friendly and decidedly un-pop nasty (most prominently in Mystikal’s brief and furiously creepy guest verse on “Get Away” which lands the way only rhymes spat by a convicted rapist can), and it’s got stellar production and carefully chosen guest spots. It’s front-loaded with its the hardest, most effective tracks, where leadoff single “Hard White,” a Lil Jon-marbled banger, goes without a pause for breath into “Born In The Gutter,” a bundle of badly lit, synth-sliced horror verses about extreme poverty wrapped up in Yelawolf’s most menacing delivery and a lot of screaming. And when a tongue-in-cheek skit conversation between Yelawolf and Eminem in which the senior rapper suggests “a love song…bitches like love songs” leads into the sugary “Good Girl,” the most radio-groomed song on the whole album, it doesn’t even feel cheap or like a concession. It’s only in the last third of the album that the verses about “the hardest love” and the generic-sounding guitar-backed hooks begin to pile up and drag and Yelawolf sounds like he’s sort of losing his focus.
Yet, Yelawolf is front and center the entire time, and almost never fails to deliver. Sort of like the current nexus between Kid Rock (also guesting on the album) and Eminem, his flow switches from jittery meth-speed rant to an oily Andre 3000-sounding drawl without warning. And, there’s Alabama pride splashed all over these tracks. Sometimes, like on the album’s softest track “Write Your Name,” it approaches sounding corny. It’s not that Yelawolf sounds like he’s pandering; it’s that his strengths lie more in the boasting verses, the angry and dark stories that fill the penultimate track “Slumerican Shitizen,” which is why I hope Yelawolf doesn’t make a grab for heartland pop success and lose the edge and humor in the process. I’d much rather he lead us to where the party is and get us all wasted on something homemade and corrosive because from the best parts of Radioactive, it sounds like he knows how to get there.
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