Album Review: R3SET by Mike WiLL Made-It
Mike WiLL Made-It lost everything on two hard drives and spent nine years figuring out what to build next. R3SET is the answer, and Atlanta is the blueprint.
Both of Mike WiLL Made-It’s hard drives got stolen around 2017. The main and the backup. He’d already won a Grammy for “Humble,” already put Rae Sremmurd on, already placed “Formation” for Beyoncé and “Pour It Up” for Rihanna. The résumé was finished. He bought real estate, bought the Atlanta studio that became his Made It Way compound, and spent time gambling on 2K instead of making beats. Nine years passed. R3SET is the third Ransom installment, and it’s a directory of everyone he came up with, signed, produced for, or grew up around in Atlanta. Four generations of rappers show up. Some of them have something to say. Some of them are just glad to be there.
By riding the Faith Evans sample, 21 Savage opens the album on “ATL (APP3CIAT3 TH3 LOV3)” by naming streets: Moreland, McAfee, Panola, River Road, Callister, and Alison Court. He kicks doors, picks up women, posts at the buddies, and raps about a woman who falls for street guys because she feels alone, whose man takes her phone when he sleeps. Someone gets shot in the head riding in a car people thought belonged to somebody else. 21 gives addresses, and the specificity carries the whole first half of the song. The Part II flip, co-produced by London on da Track, loosens the beat into something hazier while 21 raps about Percs and big checks, and the joint drops you into Atlanta without asking if you’ve been.
The strongest material on R3SET clusters around money. Killer Mike’s bars on the Zaytoven co-produced “MON3Y TALK$” are the most specific thing on the entire record—he made his millions from rapping about trapping, made ten times what he made actually trapping, stood at the store with crack prostitutes and junkies, watched prescription addiction turn a boss into a flunky. Then he tells a story about a guy who gets kidnapped by his own uncle over ransom money his daddy wouldn’t put up, and the daddy was so cold he refused to pay. The uncle ended up dead, announced on Channel 2 news the next day while goons got paid in the living room. That’s a full short film inside sixteen bars, and Mike WiLL just lets the Junior M.A.F.I.A. “Get Money” sample run underneath it. T.I. opens the same song talking about dropping a Lamb with a bad bitch in it, popping his shit on repeat until his bankroll reaches Elon territory. Young Dro says he’s wealthy strictly on selfishness. Three different takes on what cash buys and what it ruins, stacked on the same beat.
Hunxho, on the laidback “@ 874,” takes it somewhere else. A RICO charge couldn’t send him down, tried to charge him because of his past, because he’s Black. He might never win a Grammy, could they send him back and he won’t see his family. 2 Chainz, on the same song, fronted his uncle some grams and the uncle ran off, then threatened to whip his ass if he kept asking for the money back. He’s seen forty pounds on a coffee table, knows young guys who’ll kill you in front of Grady Hospital, and admits he needs love—if he doesn’t get it, he’ll take it. R3SET talks about money on nearly every one of its fifteen joints, but these sets of bars earn it. They tell you exactly who lost what and where.
J. Cole shows up on bass-heavy “OFG!” and lets a verse wander on purpose. He shouts out Lionel Messi, says he just started watching soccer, asks why they put a girl in the hood, why they try to cancel him. He needs to catch up on Rick and Morty. He misses giving dick to a hater’s girlfriend. His mind’s like a crime scene, ten projects in, over forty, maybe told every story. He’s watching a Vlad interview with Yung Joc when someone calls his phone, and he lets it ring because he doesn’t want to be friends. He says put him on the list with Pac, Biggie, Bob Marley, Snoop, and The LOX, then drops a Sam Bankman-Fried reference. The chorus flips the whole thing sideways:
“I don’t got no problems
Only opportunities for growth
Life is a what? Fuck a missionary, squeeze her throat
I’m in the cut cookin’ up a hunnid keys of dope.”
That’s J. Cole sounding bored and unguarded at the same time, half-convinced the self-help language is a joke and half meaning it. The bars meander, sure, but the details are so specific and odd that they hold your attention: watching soccer for the first time at forty-two, not picking up the phone, admitting he can’t chase women at the club anymore and calling himself an artist instead of a boss. It’s one of the more honest things he’s recorded in years precisely because it isn’t trying to be.
The back end of R3SET shifts into something quieter. CeeLo Green, on the gospel-inspired “ALL I KNOW,” sings about cutting himself out of the stone, putting his heart in the chest and becoming God in the flesh, and then asks the question the whole song hangs on: “I still believe in God, but does God believe in me?” He keeps failing, keeps returning, keeps relearning. His dreams are his real life; when he’s awake it’s make-believe. He wonders if he’s having a conversation with imaginary friends he created to be appreciated. CeeLo sounds both sure of himself and terrified of the answer, and the disorientation is the point.
Lil Keed died at twenty-four. His posthumous “IN MY H3AD,” released on what would have been his twenty-eighth birthday, puts a dead man’s voice in the room talking about fighting demons alone and holding things back from people. “This shit ‘posed to been said but I held it back from you.” He raps about enjoying his daughter’s laughter, about ditching Instagram for reality, about showing someone the Bentley life. His closest partner did something unspoken. “When the smoke clear I’ll have a hundred milly.” That sentence weighs different knowing the smoke never cleared. Sid Sriram’s “AAA” sits between these two and asks someone to never leave, and if the three were sequenced intentionally (devotion, grief, faith), they form the album’s most coherent stretch.
OJ da Juiceman on the catchy “STOV3 LIT” is a direct callback to the apartment buildings where Mike WiLL first met Gucci Mane and started his career. Juiceman raps about fish scale and Kermit frogs jumping out the pot, the stove eye fucked up, straight trap cooking with zero decoration. The choices like that one, the Killer Mike bars, the Keed feature, the Juiceman callback, are where you feel the hand of the person who built this. The weaker joints, the sex-song boilerplate on “D33P3R” and the women-led “MY WAY” that coasts on attitude without giving any of its three rappers enough room, are where the producer disappears and the formula takes over. The LP runs long, and not all of it needed to be here. But the ones that did earn their place so firmly that the filler becomes tolerable, the way dead air between good conversations is just dead air and not a reason to leave the room.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “OFG!,” “MON3Y TALK$,” “IN MY H3AD”