I used to think that Pitbull didn’t know how to rap.
I didn’t really start listening to Pitbull until the release of his 2011 opus, Planet Pit.
During this time, Pitbull was doing as little as possible to live up to the opening lines of his monster hit, “Give Me Everything”:
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| Oh, now I get it!
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Pitbull’s song with T-Pain, “Hey Baby (Drop It To The Floor)”, first cemented this impression in my mind.
Here was a four-minute song in which Pitbull was supposedly the main artist, and he literally spent thirty seconds of it rapping. The rest of the time was given up to repetitions of “Ooh, baby, baby,” and robotic vocalizing from the featured guest. “Give Me Everything” was only slightly better in this regard—it’s on Pitbull’s album, but you could easily mistake it for a Ne-Yo record.
His guest appearances were just as lazy.
Without fail, his verse on the song lasted no more than 8 bars—incredibly short for a rap verse, especially in this day and age when Lil Wayne can appear on someone else’s song and rap for what feels like ten or twenty minutes.
Yet despite his apparent lack of rapping ability, Pitbull has become a huge crossover success and one of the most popular rappers of our time.
So I traced Pitbull’s career back to his early days as a part of Lil’ Jon’s posse. There, I found an album called M.I.A.M.I., and when I listened to it, I had a revelation.
Pitbull actually knows how to rap.
For me, the most notable thing about Pitbull’s debut album is how full of rapping it is.
There are a few guest verses (most notably from Fat Joe and Bun B.), but even in those songs, Pitbull raps just as much as the featured artist, sometimes more. There are even a few songs where Pitbull performs the entire chorus himself, something that he, along with most mainstream rappers, has moved away from.
In fact, Compared to the pop-centric Planet Pit, M.I.A.M.I. is a fully standard rap album.
There’s the “repping-for-my-city” song (“305 Anthem”), a few generic “club” songs (“Get on the Floor”, “Back Up”), some “for-the-ladies” sex raps that range from uninspired to specifically and unnervingly sexual (“Shake It Up”, “I Wonder”) and violent, crime-centered songs that have more of a gangsta-rap influence than anything in Pitbull’s later work (“Dirty”, “Melting Pot”, “We Don’t Care Bout Ya”).
It’s actually a little disappointing how generic this album is. Planet Pit is so crammed full of guest vocalists and big-name producers churning out one potential single after another that it actually transcends its blatantly commercial nature and becomes exciting.
“What will the next hook be like?” “How much will the next song make me want to dance?” “When will I actually hear Pitbull’s voice again?” These are the sorts of questions that come to mind when listening to Planet Pit.
M.I.A.M.I doesn’t inspire any sort of questions. The only thing this album inspired in me was surprise at the amount of rapping Pitbull does; that, and a sort of admiration.
I honestly didn’t know he had it in him.
That admiration soon faded as I discovered that just because Pitbull knows how to rap doesn’t mean he’s particularly good at it. In the more confrontational, gangsta-rap/”305-till-I-die” tracks, he can hide behind faceless bluster and rote shout-outs, but when he steps out of his comfort zone even a little, the results are awkward and embarrassing.
Take, for example, the song “Hustla’s Withdrawal”, in which Pitbull explains: “Hustlin’s like a drug, it’s addicting/The more you hustle, the more you get addicted.”
If that flat, completely uninteresting simile doesn’t convince you, take a look at this:
I’m not even sure what that actually means. But it’s not the failure of his metaphors that makes Pitbull a bad rapper; entire careers have been built on straightforward gangsta boasting with little variation.
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| I’m looking your way, Rick Ross.
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Pitbull’s biggest problem is that even his “hustla” raps are completely forgettable.
I’ve listened to the entirety of M.I.A.M.I. several times over, and aside from the more specific sexual references and disgusting visuals (there’s one line where Pitbull describes the consistency of his urine that I will refrain from printing so that it won’t haunt you like it haunts me), I’d be hard pressed to recall even one memorable line.
There is one memorable thing about this album, though: “Culo”, the first appearance of the sensibility that would drive Pitbull’s career in the future.
In this song, you can hear traces of his big crossover hit, “You Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)”. The lyrics are forgettable when they aren’t (again) disconcertingly sexual, but the beat is danceable and the chorus is catchy. I
n fact, even though I don’t speak Spanish and can’t actually understand the lyrics, I can say without a doubt that the chorus is the best part of the song. Pitbull must agree, because he cuts off his second verse halfway through just to get back to that great hook.
That’s something that I actually still admire about Pitbull: he knows his strengths. See, when M.I.A.M.I. was released, it actually peaked at number 14 on the Billboard 200, and that’s nothing to scoff at. But with each album Pitbull released, he sank further towards the bottom of the charts.
Pitbull was only 23 when he released his first album.
By the time he released “I Know You Want Me”, he was half a decade older and much wiser. He knew that people didn’t want to hear him rap; they wanted a fun beat to dance to. And hey, if Pitbull wanted to shout some lyrics over that beat, even better! As long as all those words didn’t get in the way of their dancing.
So, of course, “I Know You Want Me” took Pitbull back to the top of the charts. Two years later, he released Planet Pit, which takes the wisdom he applied to that single and stretches it out to an entire album. Not only is Planet Pit fun to listen to (much more so than the exhausting M.I.A.M.I.), it became his highest-charting album to date.
So, maybe Pitbull isn’t the best rapper in the world. But you know what?
He doesn’t need to be.
There are plenty of people out there trying to be the best lyricist, trying to find the best way to tell their story. Good for them. But no matter how good their similes and metaphors are, they’re never going to make a song that’s as much fun as “Rain Over Me.”
You see, there are thousands of rappers.
But there’s only one Pitbull.
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| Dale! |
