Review: Flo Rida, Mail on Sunday

On Mail on Sunday, Flo Rida joylessly repeats all the tired tropes of Southern party rap.

Flo Rida, Mail on SundayFlo Rida, or as his probably embarrassed mother calls him, Tramar Dillard, sings like a rapper and raps like a singer—a cross between Pharrell and Nelly, but worse. As Rick Ross has proved already this year, a good rap album need not a good rapper, but sadly that truism doesn’t apply on Flo’s Mail on Sunday.

Flo joylessly repeats all the tired tropes of Southern party rap (brand-name fetishizing, drug-trade mythologizing, stripper-bitch glorifying), and the album’s best track has already been let out of the bag: After one has sufficiently digested the stupidly addicting “Low,” featuring T-Pain, everything else is a big disappointment. Timbaland throws Flo a bone in “Elevator,” a nicely burnished if unremarkable sample of his electro-synth style, while on “American Superstar,” Lil Wayne reprises the wheezy moan from “Duffle Bag Boy,” only this time he squeezes his grimace a little too far and enters the realm of self-parody.

The album’s worst track is probably the my-ho-is-gone ballad “Still Missin,” but “Ms. Hangover,” in which Flo approximates the female anatomy to various alcoholic beverages (“She had Hennessy hips, and Belve’ eyes/Grey Goose on her lips, and cognac thighs”), is more offensive. Only one thing separates Flo from the gutter of hip-hop: a triple-platinum single. And unless he can once again catch the coattails of T-Pain or some other hit-magnet, odds are that he’ll be beginning his descent back into anonymity very soon.

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 Label: Atlantic  Release Date: March 18, 2008  Buy: Amazon

Wilson McBee

Wilson McBee has written for Pop Matters, Southwest Review, and other publications.

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