Album Review: Love Is the New Gangsta by 6LACK
On his fourth album, the Atlanta singer-rapper turns the title’s gangsta into the labor of holding grief and not weaponizing it.
Love Is the New Gangsta arrives with a caption promoted to cover, inviting the easy take that 6LACK has confused a marketing line for an argument. On “Bounty,” a four-bar revenge fantasy operating as Exhibit A, 6LACK raps, “There’s a bounty on your head, post one to post just for whoever want this bread,” weaponizing a lying ex into a wanted post. Eight bars later: “You ain’t gotta die to meet your death, my condolences is my eye shed.” Contract slides into Hallmark condolence. Gangsta in the title becomes the work of holding grief and refusing to let it turn into a weapon. 6LACK runs the threat and the funeral on one wire until the title sits in the pocket of a job description.
Massing image on image (Marshall Faulk pun about the safety number, then courtship in the south of France, then Patek loaded with relics), 6LACK writes the most extravagant rapper-in-love verse of his career on “Wifey Baby Mama” verse 2. That same extravagance is what “Vision” and the bonus “story is mine” still run out of long before their runtimes do. “Fellowship and politickin’” is sung on “Vision” as if the phrase carried weight, and the daughter pun (“Let’s have a daughter and then work until the son is up”) reaches for wordplay it doesn’t hit. On the bonus 6LACK closes with a self-help axiom anyone could have written: “I been tryna be the best me, sometimes it feel like life just wanna test me.” Held against the Marshall Faulk pun or the chest-on-his-chest writing of “Foot On My Neck,” “Vision” and the bonus get out-reached by their album-mates. “Vision” still grabs. “Story is mine” settles.
“Baby, it’s me, open the gate,” 6LACK sings on “I GUESS,” before narrating “She opened the door, the weapon was raised.” Once the door opens, the breakup is a home invasion in which 6LACK simultaneously plays the man with bad intentions who came to confront, the man without a key who needs to be let in, and the man on both sides of the threshold who is also the one being apologized to from the doorstep. 6LACK plays both intruder and host. “The sad, sad song was the record she played, the sad, sad song was the record we made” rewrites the relationship as a track listing of one song. She says “Don’t touch me” twice; both times he only answers with “I’m so sorry” addressed to nobody. Call and response get split between his vocal track and his ad-lib track, the breakup staged as a duet of one.
After only two lines of singing, the close of “Foot On My Neck” softens into a spoken passage about a woman finding peace on a man’s chest, the tenderest stretch yet from him on the album. “See, it ain’t nothin’ better than subbin’ to a man who loves you right,” 6LACK says (a sentence he would have laughed off in 2017), “like, you can lay your head on his chest to feel safe and calm.” Tender writing from the same guy whose first song puts a bounty on his ex. The contradiction, if you wanted to call it that, doubles as the argument.
On “Ashin’ the Blunt,” Young Thug enters hoarse. In middle school Thug battled 6LACK in cyphers. Half the years since he has spent inside RICO proceedings. From a shuttered room, his fame paranoia spills out: “Can’t go out the house, can’t look at the sun,” and “Chanel coat, sit from the nosebleeds,” and “I’ll drop my nuts about you, girl, I turn to King Kong.” In answer 6LACK raps, “Niggas think they ballin’ ’til they file that tax.” A few bars later he still lands the kicker: “Now my cup runneth over and Young Thugger thugger than Scarface.” Cypher in 2010, two roads since. Both end at 30.
A black sedan moves down I-85 with Zone 6 still dragging past the window, and “Bear” runs underneath the drive. “Care for a nigga for a second, share with a nigga for a second, bear with a nigga for a second,” 6LACK sings low and unhurried. From inside the windshield, the bars about the men who’d be riding shotgun strike harder than any beat. “All of my niggas got POs or OD, most of my niggas got COs or cold feet,” 6LACK raps, and the cohort dissolves into a Friday phone tree with nobody picking up. Past the next exit comes “A whole lot of love, but it wasn’t peace, sure was HD, but I couldn’t see,” and love-as-new-gangsta turns into a survival map for a man whose original cohort is dead, locked up, or scared. The old ways buried the men who lived them; love is what’s left to keep this driver upright. “I’m in Atlanta on 85 hurtin’ like you won’t believe,” 6LACK sings, his wheel gripped at ten and two.
A father since 2017, 6LACK has been writing about it; on “TRAUMA” he counts the kids emphatically. 6LACK sings, “That’s one girl and one boy, and two girls like 2-4,” naming four children in numerals against the mother-and-father inheritance he names two bars earlier. Lamar Jackson enters two bars in. “Opportunity, felt trapped in, life of a Black man, 6 was really lackin’, WrestleMania, I’m fully tapped in,” 6LACK pushes that inheritance into a body that disdains to pass it down. “Lettin’ ‘em board the medicine board, but wouldn’t take my own regimen,” he raps, the dosage being prescribed for everyone but him. “Demons heckle from the stands, bet you’ll never laugh again,” he answers from the floor.
On “On Me,” 6LACK opens with “Tip of my tongue, blood on my blood, the minute you’re gone, the feelings they flood,” before pivoting to “Why hold a grudge when you know it’s love?” Three bars later Odeal joins him, and the two harmonize: “I see God in you, I see God in me, so I don’t wanna hurt nobody.” Two voices deliver the album’s premise on a feature track, sandwiched between a villa fantasy and a road song. A father of four, still raised by the same Zone 6 cohort referenced on “Bear,” puts the rule out loud: hold the damage; refuse to spread it.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Bird Flu,” “Foot On My Neck,” “Bear”