Album Review: Set In Stone by Rick Ross
Five years after his last solo album, the kingpin fantasy is now a Miami institution. Set In Stone moves at yacht speed and stops at the funeral home as often as the jeweler.
Back when photographs were published of rap’s noisiest cocaine wholesaler dressed up in a pressed correctional officer’s uniform in 2008, the career that ought to have ended instead grew even larger. William Roberts had built his character out of a cocaine trafficker’s name, eighteen months of state employment, and a daydream of Miami weight, and the moment the city took it upon itself that the dream was worth more than the paper, Rick Ross could keep it as long as he liked. Two decades on from Port of Miami and almost five since he put out a solo album, he keeps it going on Set In Stone, past fifty now, a man senior to the hustlers he studied and wealthy enough that nobody bothers asking questions anymore.
His fantasy fills up on its own with the detail of “Caviar Bumps” with six Rolls-Royces, a few Range Rovers, Birkins in crocodile, a European villa still on payment plans. The devil lurks somewhere in the shadows of the same verse, squatting near the mosh pit, keeping the safety off his pistol, and Ross gives his enemies their instructions with his own words: “Put your feet in my shoes, strangle me with my laces.” From a spoken aside, he crowns himself Miami’s Martin Scorsese and names the minimum size of the yacht fleet at a hundred and ten feet. YFN Lucci makes the most straightforward case for the entire fantasy in “Ring Around the Rolls”: “I was in the back of a paddy wagon, shackled and shit/Now, I spend three hundred stacks to sit in the back of it.” And Ross responds with a time bomb that must eventually explode, a room he clears of rats when he first lays eyes on them, and, along the way, “All these fuck niggas on the Epstein list.”
T.I. delivers the meanest verse on “Mahogany Caskets,” having married the game with a prenuptial agreement and willing to bring a competitor’s brand-new teeth home as a trophy and laughing after the mic. Ross matches that in feds who already have all the details, a rat who spilled so quick that the prosecutors themselves got jealous, and a simple “Shoot up all your shit, fuck 50 Cent” ordered up like lunch. Jeezy walks into “Maybach Music VII” with the oldest wealth in the building, remembering when they called him Master P and when “A hundred bricks a week, and we was calling that a flop,” while Don Toliver takes whatever you can afford from the hook. Max B rolls into “Minks In Miami” loaded from a hard day’s work and ready to celebrate, and French Montana credits his own coke wave for reviving New York City from Morocco to the Bronx.
But somewhere between the branzino orders and the Phantom upgrades, some of the dead begin to show up. “Blood stains on my Nike Airs/Are they really teardrops from my nightmares?” Ross wonders on “City Lights,” a night drive where The-Dream sings of a three-wide Rolls dipped in cocaine. He states Whitney Houston’s drug overdose as fact on “Big Fish,” alongside the Poconos coke traps, then recalls the two years that he and Black Bo, the manager he lost in 2017, wore ankle bracelets fighting all of their cases. Gucci Mane comes aboard the song as a killer whale in a very small pond, wiping himself clean with dollars, promising to make somebody’s mother miss them. Nipsey Hussle shows up in “Remarkable Hussle” in a recorded phone call about his faith and the marathon, and Ross answers him directly: “When you winning like Nipsey, boy, they gonna gun you down.” Leon Thomas sings the hook as Ross prays for all the sinners, starting with himself. “My name set in stone for life, they gonna remember me,” he vows, older now than Nipsey ever got a chance to be.
There is even a tribute record to Magic City in “Face Down,” with Rich The Kid bragging that he has been rich since SoundCloud and Ross enjoying himself in sunglasses while the plane sits on the runway. There isn’t anything in it that requires any effort from either man, and there isn’t anything in it that lasts the ride home. “#23” runs a little thinner, two brief verses and a Jordan free-throw chorus around a pledge to “unalive any individuals that try to undermine,” street menace written in content-moderation language. Yung Miami works harder than Ross (shocker!) on “She’s My Star” over a lavish J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League production, throwing bottles in the club, demanding to be treated as a star, making him beg, “Caresha, please,” while Ross just breezes through a verse of shopping instructions.
For “Do It One Time,” Ross puts the keys to DJ Nasty, who pays tribute to DJ Uncle Al, Uncle Luke, and Disco Rick in a verse that describes where the Dickies and the golds come from. Ross sneaks an RIP Uncle Al into his own verse and raps like a man who has lived his whole life in the city; Young Breed eats fried conch in front of the club, and the list reaches Liberty City, Overtown, and Brownsville by name. Kodak Black and Ball Greezy pull “Diamonds Never Die” into the same orbit, Kodak multiplying his snipers, Greezy nodding at the dope man without a word, Ross seeing a car today and buying it tomorrow.
Deon Cole flies into Miami with a few conditions. He wants to be met in one car, not nineteen, because the last visit had him riding a whole fleet on his valet ticket, and he tells his host that a car had been left at the hotel but nobody had come back for it yet. He requests that the profits from the strip club be passed on to him under the table, and that Ross leaves only one woman in his room instead of four, because the last four had stolen his glasses, his belts, and even the insoles from his shoes. During the two monologues of “Camel Meat,” Ross enjoys camel meat in Dubai, schedules his murders for July, and prices a palace for his two wives at fifty million dollars. But somewhere in Miami, a Rolls-Royce waits on a hotel valet parking lot, waiting on a man who owns a hundred and ninety-nine more.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Maybach Music VII,” “Remarkable Hussle,” “Big Fish”