Posted on 07/23/2008
There’s no denying it: if you are from the South, your chances of getting in the rap game are pretty good right now, thanks to the tremendous success of people like Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Three 6 Mafia and even Plies, who has managed to stick around longer than most thought he would. However, this also means that if you are from the South, your chances of getting in the rap game—even if you’re talents aren’t particularly distinguishable from the glut of rappers coming out from the Dirty Dirty—are pretty good. This translates into the mediocre, paint-by-numbers debut of 2 Pistols, Death Before Dishonor.

To be fair, there’s nothing particularly bad about 2 Pistols on paper. He’s not the most creative lyricist or punchline master, but he’s not the worst either. The beats—provided mostly by J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League with a few others sprinkled in—aren’t anything new or fresh, but they are solid throughout. But that in a nutshell is everything that makes Death Before Dishonor so underwhelming; there’s nothing about this album or 2 Pistols himself that is particularly memorable or noteworthy amidst the flood of Southern rap releases. This is especially true when judged against the likes of recent hits like Lil Wayne’s Carter III or Bun B’s II Trill. Death Before Dishonor takes no risks to set itself apart from the pack, and in doing so succeeds in making itself irrelevant.

It’s a shame, because as mentioned above, there’s nothing wrong with 2 Pistols as a rapper. He’s got the swagger, apparently has plenty of street cred and can ride the Southern-fried beats he’s provided with confidence. The title track does a good job of highlighting his talents, with a flow similar to a combination of Lil Wayne and Plies. Unfortunately, the rest of the album falls into the predictable blueprint of many releases—a couple songs about the shorty who holds him down (“She Got It,” “That’s My Word”), a song detailing some sort of crime (“Robbery” in this case), a track about how he came up hard (“From the Bottom”) and the rest filled in with monotonous stories of hustling and copping bricks. Everything from the appearance of T-Pain on the pre-packaged radio single “She Got It” to the “Phone Skit” (still biting off Ready to Die 15 years later) to 2 Pistols referencing himself as “young boss of the city” feels straight out of the playbook. By the time the album wraps up after 17 tracks, all possible clichés seem to have been used up.

Death Before Dishonor isn’t a completely unworthy album for Southern rap fans. As mentioned, 2 Pistols is an adequate rapper, and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League (“We Run It,” “Let’s Ride”) deserves much of the credit for keeping things moving on the instrumental side. But unfortunately 2 Pistols seems perfectly content conforming to regional standards, which in a time of prodigious output for the South means his debut album will likely slip into obscurity.

- Martin Caballero