Flo 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 does not apply on Flo’s Mail on Sunday. He 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; on “American Superstar,” Lil Wayne reprises the wheezy moan from “Duffle Bag Boy,” but 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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