In the video for Lincoln Way Night's whip-worshipping lead single "Slapp," shots of Stalley's face, reflected in a rearview mirror, flash across the screen. Sandwiched between sun-soaked images of tricked-out trucks and rehabbed muscle cars, his stoic stare focuses on the road behind him, even as he guides his whip down the road ahead. While much of Lincoln Way Nights features smoothed-out, bass-heavy bangers that big up car culture and late-night cruising ("Pound," "She Hates the Bass"), at its core, Stalley's latest is actually an exercise in introspection, a looking back while looking within.
Though pensive rap poetics is certainly not new territory for Stalley (check 2009’s MadStalley:The Autobiography), producer Rashad gives the rapper new legs with which to tread the familiar terrain. Mostly mellow, sometimes melancholy, the horn-embellished head-nodders have both a gritty edge and a glimmer of hope that mirrors the bipolarity between who Stalley was and who he hopes to be. Pondering a somewhat unproductive past pushes him to put some priorities in place, but striving for success means coming faces to face with his flaws (“The Sound of Silence,” “The Night”).
To put the past behind him, he has to fly the coop both literally and figuratively, and even as he prepares to leave the nest, his vivid verbal illustrations of life in Masillon, Ohio (“Lincoln Way Nights (Shop),” “330,” “See the Milq from My Chevy”) show that home is where the heart is. Ready for flight, he flexes his wings on “Hercules,” “Go On,” and “Hard,” and though self doubt, wack rappers (“Monkey Ish”), loose family ties (“Tell Montez I Love Her”), and relationship drama (“Milq n’ Honey”) threaten to cage this bird in, it’s not enough to keep it from singing (or in this case, rapping). Such earnest soul-searching from a rapper is rare and refreshing these days, a sound and style that’s unique and honest enough to help Stalley’s music career really soar.
