Home Is Where the Patience Is

DETROIT 2

Big Sean • 2020 • G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam

This feels both useless to say and impossible to prove at the same time, but I solemnly swear that I learned about Detroit 2 three years ago, directly from the source.

April 29, 2017: I spot KeY Wane at friend of the project Martin Weiss’s Not Your Average Brunch at home in downtown Detroit, and I eventually build up the liquid courage to go talk to him. After maybe ten minutes, I guess I’d earned his trust.

“You wanna know a secret,” he leaned in.

Uh, yeah?

“We’re working on Detroit 2.”

That was it. He left it there, and I felt like I had way more already than I should’ve.

That December, Big Sean released Double or Nothing with Metro Boomin — and not Detroit 2. Then he announced Unfriendly Reminder, a 31-city tour where each city’s crowd would be responsible for that night’s setlist. But then that got postponed, and eventually cancelled altogether. By the end of 2018, I assumed Detroit 2 was never coming.

I didn’t begrudge him for killing the concept, if that was indeed the case. The first Detroit has been unanimously crowned the jewel of his 13-year career, the project easily the best amalgamation of Sean’s overall skillset. By the release of Double or Nothing, Sean was being roundly mocked on social media — for that project in particular, but more broadly for a career that too many found disappointing. Listen, I’ve understood in the past that Sean isn’t for everybody: the puns could be very punny, the punchlines somewhat strained, his attempts at lyrical ingenuity occasionally betraying a lack of sophistication. But some of the vitriol by late 2017 felt especially mean. Malicious, even. Besides, sequels are notoriously difficult to execute: often either a transparent cash grab or, worse, a cynical grasp at relevancy via nostalgia. Provided what Detroit means to Sean both personally and professionally, both italicized and not, a sequel needed to be the most intentional, critic-proof album he’s delivered. And that must’ve felt like not only an impossibility at that time, but even worse, a chore.

I’m personally elated that he took the time. Detroit 2 has emerged as Big Sean’s magnum opus: everything critics adored about the mixtape, plus the accoutrement afforded to an official studio album. Purposeful from its start, Sean truly maximizes each moment on this project, the more laughable punchlines of his past replaced by some of the wittier entendres he’s ever constructed. I’ve been fascinated by this run in “Why Would I Stop?” —

I’m going down as one of the gods

G-O-D, D-O-A, dead-or-alive

I’m laying low, they could be espionage

This ain’t no walk in the park, you can’t slide

Solution to everyone else ‘round me problems

Next episode, got the whole fucking world watching

I might leave the series, come back like I’m Rodman

Get it now or right now, my only two options

— trying to poke holes in … anything. The delivery, the simile choices, whatever has validated Sean’s detractors in the past. There’s nothing. Detroit 2 is Sean at his most technically proficient, a master of flows and cadences that once appeared frankly ambitious, packing that one final syllable in — and on time! — where you thought it wouldn’t fit.

The Detroit Easter eggs, both italicized and not, are spread throughout the album. The second half of “Lucky Me” is essentially a homage to 2012 Sean — “Woah there, don’t go there / Now slow down, lil’ brodie / I know you don’t know me / I’m buffed up, my chest up / I feel like Hulk Hogan” — replete with early-era KeY Wane violins during the song’s postlogue. “Body Language” samples Dale’s “Soulful Moaning,” a city classic that should’ve been the biggest song on the planet. Sean recruits the legendary No ID to flip DJ Snowflake’s “Godzilla” for “The Baddest,” and Detroit Deltas now have their unofficial anthem for the next few lifetimes. (Bonus points if you caught the Golightly shoutout, too.) And “Friday Night Cypher” — the song name a tribute to the weekly radio rap competitions where Sean got his start — manages to work against all odds, congealing around a spirited performance by Sean himself, who sounded absolutely motivated to prove himself Detroit’s best rapper against some guys (and a lady — hi, Kash Doll) who certainly don’t lack for confidence. Detroit 2 adheres to the mixtape’s blueprint pretty faithfully, and is, in my opinion, much more affecting as a love letter to the city.

But even though the lines between mixtape and album are as blurred as ever in 2020, make no mistake they still exist, and this album’s tracklisting is your proof. The first voice you hear on Detroit 2 that isn’t Sean is the late, great Nipsey Hussle on “Deep Reverence,” and from there, the guests only get grander: Post Malone and Travis Scott feature on earworms that are certain to do numbers on radio; Puff Daddy surfaces to bless Sean’s career-to-date on “Full Circle”; Lil Wayne turns back the clock for his verse on the should’ve-been-album-opener “Don Life”; Dave Chappelle (!) and Stevie Wonder (!!) sound ecstatic to be featured on an album released by Big Sean.

(Also, because Rhyanna demanded I include this anecdote: I actually caught myself tearing up while listening to “Story by Dave Chappelle” for the first time because I was in attendance at the next night’s show, where he dedicated the entire set to how spectacularly bad he was the night before. Five years later, it remains the funniest night of stand-up I think I’ll ever see. It was almost as if we reaped the benefits of Dave bombing the night before; there’s zero chance he’d allow that to happen twice, consecutively, in a row. Hearing Dave share that story felt surreal, because if you don’t live in Detroit, how else would you get to experience that exact moment, you know? He transported millions to my humble hometown, if only for a few seconds. Plus, knowing I share a memory with Dave Chappelle is pretty fucking cool, too.)

On the whole, Detroit 2 feels natural and, most importantly, earned. Earned has been the word most on my mind as I’ve contemplated this album, the highs-and-lows of the last decade a lesson for Sean in whose opinions should hold any merit. “Oh, you mistake me falling down for falling off / Or mistake me being soft for speaking from the heart,” he raps on personal favorite “Guard Your Heart,” confirming both that yes, he’s heard your criticisms and no, none of them matter. “When I compare my purpose to someone else’s, then it is no longer my purpose” is a maxim even Twitter has to respect.

All things considered, Big Sean probably couldn’t have made this version of Detroit 2 three years ago. Patience is a virtue, and I’m willing to wager he learned that one from the city we both call home.

GRADE: 8.75 / 10. If I were D2’s A&R, the only alteration I’d make is transforming “Don Life” into the album intro, saving Lil Wayne’s verse for the remix and the album’s inevitable deluxe edition. That nitpick aside, Detroit 2 is expertly sequenced: a ‘90s-baby’s tribute to the city that made him, and the lessons learned from the city that inform all he’s become.

Recommendations: “Guard Your Heart (feat. Anderson .Paak, Earlly Mac & Wale),” “Why Would I Stop?,” “Harder Than My Demons,” “Still I Rise (feat. Dom Kennedy),” “FEED,” “Deep Reverence (feat. Nipsey Hussle)”