Paperwork is the first album in a while from T.I. that doesn’t feel weighed down. No Mercy, his first album after a prison sentence, made T.I. sound exhausted. The music was gloomy, plodding, worn out. Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Hand‘s overstuffed tracklist felt like a mea culpa, a huge, sprawling record meant as a return to an older swagger. The resulting album, though, felt more directionless than exploratory, one that looked for new territory but often settled for old ideas.
Paperwork, though, does feel like a fresh start. It’s out on T.I.’s own Grand Hustle imprint, and the executive producer (who also produces a few tracks on his own) is Pharrell. The music here, and T.I.’s performance, feels unencumbered, almost playful. If both Pharrell and T.I.’s big cultural moment in recent history came from “Blurred Lines”, the music on this album seems uninterested in repeating that success. Instead, the best parts of Paperwork recall T.I.’s verse on Killer Mike’s “Big Beast”. That track, which opened Mike’s 2012 masterstroke, R.A.P. Music let us know that, with the right producer (El-P then, Pharrell and others now) T.I.’s dynamic rapping can sound both effortless and artful.
The collaboration on “Big Beast”, between El-P, Killer Mike, Bun B, and T.I., also predicts the way collaborations work on this record. On “G’Shit”, T.I. scuffs up his flow to play alongside Jeezy. On “Oh Yeah”, Pharrell works his glitchy soul leanings into a trap beat T.I. sounds at home on. “On Doe, On Phil” finds T.I. trading verses with Trae the Truth, and both deliver sinister whispers over a beat that plays up the horror-film atmospherics.
Paperwork moves through styles and moods much like Trouble Man did, but here there are logical connections and, frankly, better execution of those changes. Some of these shifts also allow T.I. to explore new thematic territory. “New National Anthem”, which features Skylar Gray, feels like a beefed-up distant cousin to Danny Brown’s “25 Bucks”. Both link electro-pop with hip-hop seamlessly. Here T.I. takes aim at gun culture and, instead of contradicting his man tales of violence, he creates a new extension of them. If hip-hop deals often in the cautionary tale of gun violence, here T.I. aims at more direct tragedy with stunning effects. Here and elsewhere on the record, you start to see how Paperwork could be the start of a trilogy of records, because here is where it sounds like T.I. has a fire under him to say something, to distance his musical persona from the other one that appears on VH1 shows.
Around these successes, though, there’s some more questionable moments. Paperwork is exactly the kind of overly long mainstream hip-hop record that feels dated in its construction. Considering the continued power of mixtape culture, and the success of pared-down but brilliant albums from the likes of Vince Staples and Run the Jewels, it’s hard to figure why these bloated hip-hop records still get put out, why we still get the deluxe versions alongside them (often made exclusive to Best Buy or Target, as if to drive home how dated the approach is). The excess here also presents itself in pretty bland versions of expected song tropes. We get more than one sex jam. One is “At Ya Own Risk”, a dull collaboration with Usher. The other, though, is the more troubling inclusion. It’s hard to figure the reasoning behind Chris Brown singing the hook on a song about sex in 2014, but he does just that on “Private Show” and the results would be plenty boring if the inclusion of Brown here didn’t feel under-thought at best or, worse, out of touch.
These songs are particularly distracting, because around them we get the playful, inevitable future single “No Mediocre”, which features Iggy Azalea, and T.I.’s heartfelt tribute to friend Doe B on “Light It Up”. Paperwork is an album that doesn’t have to be long to be expansive, but it’s stuffed full of songs anyway. If you sift through them, you’ll find some frankly thrilling moments, ones that suggest T.I.’s best days may not all be behind him. Working with new producers has opened up his style, his writing, his approach, all in exciting ways. He just might need a more brutal editor going forward.