And he promised big guests, which turned out to be Diddy and Macklemore.
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He headlined a day of the FADER Fort at SXSW, rapping in front of a live band whose under-rehearsed din he had no idea how to navigate. Excuse My French bricked, and the year it came out, I saw French put on one of the saddest live rap performances I’ve ever seen. He has no particular on-mic magnetism of his own, and he has a bad habit of letting his guests completely overwhelm him. His rapping style is muttery and conversational, and when you remove him from the context of a Harry Fraud track like “Shot Caller,” he sounds like a happy Eeyore.
His official 2013 debut, Excuse My French, was a limp hit-chasing cobbled-together nothing that lost French’s sonic identity, and his biggest hit turned out to be “Pop That,” the superstar posse cut that had Drake and Ross and Lil Wayne all outrapping French. Once the record-label machinery got moving behind French, it became painfully obvious that he was a deeply average rapper, not a star in the making. And he proved himself capable of being the rare New York rapper who could make organic collaborations with Southern guys, like the Waka Flocka Flame team-up “Choppa Choppa Down.”īut once French teamed up with Rick Ross and Diddy in some kind of Maybach Music/Bad Boy dual venture, he lost the locally specific energy that had once made him an intriguing newcomer. He teamed up with Harry Fraud, the psychedelic boom-bap producer who gave him an actual sound. But French was also capable of durable mixtape-rap bangers like “New York Minute” and “Shot Caller,” the latter of which crossed over into national underground-hit status a few years after I left the city. French was Max’s protege in the years before Max went to prison, and he got a definite boost from that association. But French could make songs, something that Mook couldn’t do and that most rappers still can’t do.
French didn’t make a great impression then. Mook would clown French viciously in some living room, then French would watch Mook’s insults and mutter half-heartedly about how they were stupid. The first time I encountered him, it was on a Smack DVD or on some other DVD-mixtape, which was going improbably deep on French’s beef with the Brooklyn battle rapper Murda Mook. I was in New York for at least part of French Montana’s rise, too. And I have a theory that Max B’s absence is the only reason we still have to deal with French Montana. Still, Max is an honest-to-god rap cult hero, a figure who’s become mythic since he went away to prison. It took Future coming along to turn it into actual good music. But at least to my mind, the whole depressive-singing thing was an interesting-in-theory formula, one that didn’t amount to much on its own. At the 2006 Hot 97 Summer Jam, Dipset closed out the show, and Cam and Jim Jones and Juelz Santana all got way, way less stage time than Max B. For me, he was just some atonal-honking dingdong who couldn’t even sing as well as Freaky Zeeky but who was allowed to ruin multiple Cam’ron hooks for way too long. I was there for 50 Cent losing his spot to Kanye West and for Jay-Z releasing Kingdom Come. I was there for the breakup of the Diplomats and for the Wu-Tang Clan’s final slide into just-for-the-heads festival fare. For a while there, people really thought Papoose and Saigon and Maino were stars in the making.
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I got to be there for the concurrent rises of a series of bring-New-York-back goons, touted mixtape prospects who never amounted to much because their music was boring. This was not an especially good period for New York rap. I spent about three and a half years in New York, starting in the middle of the last decade.
Another reason is that Max B was never especially good at making music. In 2009, he was sentenced to 75 years behind bars for setting up an armed robbery that turned into a murder. One reason is that Max has been in prison for the last seven years. Rappers have been seeking his approval, to the point where Kanye West devoted an interlude on The Life Of Pablo to making sure everyone knew Max B was OK with Kanye using the word “waves.” Max B’s recent prominence is amazing for a couple of reasons. And he’s not some unknown pioneer he’s been acknowledged as such. Over the past few years, the Harlem sing-rapper has emerged as one of the most influential rap voices in the world, his emotive drug-fogged singsong helping to make the world safe for people like Future and Wiz Khalifa.
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