It’s that quantifiable oomph in Sean’s rapping that makes Dark Sky Paradise feel immediately more substantial than anything he’s released. Not all of Dark Sky Paradise is as successful, but when it’s at its best it feels like it came from the same place: a guy rapping more ferociously than he ever has because he knows that he’s better than he ever was. That song is where everything clicks for Big Sean, and the confidence he seems to derive from fully harnessing his powers seeps from its pores. Put online in September along with three other tracks, the song is an obvious banger with an instantly catchy hook and some truly great lines-"I just bought a crib, three stories, that bitch a trilogy"-that also leverages his broken engagement with "Glee"’s Naya Rivera in a way that feels authentically inspired. The best example of this is "I Don’t Fuck With You", the song that kick-started the album and perhaps saved Sean’s career as we know it. But it is by many lengths his best album, and the first one that gets closest to hitting an elusive sweet spot where his music works as mindless fun while still leaving you just enough to chew on. Big Sean has an appeal, but that is not it.ĭark Sky Paradise, his newest, does not wholly shed his aspirations for a certain level of legitimacy, as the nonsensical but very official-sounding title would implicate. Where Sean’s debut Finally Famous was blandly listenable but anonymous-with its big hits driven by guests Chris Brown, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj- Hall of Fame felt like an overcorrection meant to position him as a rapper’s rapper, the kind of guy who you tune into to focus on lyrics. Too little of that persona was present, though, on his weirdly dour and entirely too serious second album. He is the class clown of rap, entertaining or annoying seemingly at random, but just witty enough that he’s enjoyable to have around.
Music’s "Mercy"-"ass-quake," "ass-state," "ass-tray"-are his most quintessential lyrics: funny and stupid in not-quite equal measures, but memorable in their shameless goofiness. He is good at being dumb, even if sometimes he is too dumb. Over the course of his career, Sean has honed his on-mic personality into a charming sort of gleeful obnoxiousness. For an artist with such unrelenting determination, it was a manifestation of everything he knew he could be all along.Hall of Fame was not just a problem commercially, but artistically as well. Reflecting on his triumphs and wrestling with his demons alongside marquee guests like Eminem and Migos, it was equally soulful and skillful, pensive and playful. But Big Sean’s fourth, I Decided., took things to another level. His versatility shined next to singer Jhené Aiko their self-titled 2016 release, TWENTY88, crackled with chemistry and debuted atop the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. That debut-witty, streetwise, disarmingly honest, and still brazenly self-assured-established him as one of the most flexible rappers of the 2010s, delivering euphoric, hook-driven anthems and menacing intensity on one track, then heartbroken vulnerability on the next.
Those bars led to a contract with West’s GOOD Music label, which released a trio of mixtapes before issuing Big Sean’s debut in 2011. In 2005, he met Kanye West in a radio station parking lot in his Detroit hometown and got his shot: West agreed to listen to him freestyle 16 bars. Anderson started writing poetry as a kid in the ‘90s, and by high school, he was selling self-released CDs. Big Sean’s persistence is as formidable as his sharp-witted lyricism, which rushes by, a mile a minute, in raw introspection and coy punchlines. On the eve of his 2017 release, I Decided., Big Sean told Apple Music something that might as well be his mantra: “Manifest what you want in the universe.” For the rapper born Sean Anderson, the laser focus on what he wanted to manifest-a rise to the top of the rap game through his own single-minded determination-fueled his journey from self-released mixtapes to multiplatinum success.
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