Pitchfork

T.I. has always been a great rapper, warm and fluid and confident, his loose elastic voice winding under tracks with force and finesse. Before every other mainstream rapper was talking about drugs, he was doing it with a weary lived-in authority, proudly defiant and sheepishly defensive at the same time, bragging about getting money but lamenting the fact that he only had one way to do it. But great rappers don't always make great albums, and every one of T.I.'s previous full-lengths had a fatal flaw: desperate grabs at radio love, grossly insincere sex-jams, cobbled-together non-cohesion, or all three. Last summer, I thought Young Jeezy's Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 was the album T.I. should've made. Jeezy isn't half the rapper that T.I. is, but his album-- stunning in its focus and monolithic swagger and deeply nihilistic in worldview-- had more cinematic sweep than anything his progenitor had ever done.

All that changes on King. From the opening seconds, something is different: low ominous strings, a regal horn fanfare swooping over funk guitars, and eerie horror-movie pianos welling up from some unseen abyss. The track's producer, Just Blaze, never makes tracks for Southern rappers, but here he's given T.I. a monstrous banger, something very few rappers will enjoy in their careers, and the emcee takes it like it's his birthright, stretching his drawl over the hectic boom like he just didn't have anything better to do. Over the first four tracks, nothing lets up. Texas legends UGK revisit one of their classic trunk-rattlers on "Front Back", and T.I. sounds like he's doing them a favor.

Single "What You Know" is truly epic, DJ Toomp's swollen synth woozily curling up and T.I. eating the track for lunch, beating Jeezy at the ad-lib game before delivering one of those choruses that gets stuck in your head all day and you don't even mind. And "I'm Talkin' to You" brings back Just Blaze again, laying down horn-blats with Bomb Squad urgency and T.I. coming heated and dangerous as fuck, utterly destroying some unnamed opponent ("How many different ways is it to say I'm getting cheddar more/ Than niggas twice as old, more popular and even selling more?") before busting out a head-spinning double-time flow on the last verse. When the dust finally settles, it's for "Live in the Sky", a maudlin but pretty ballad, T.I. bitterly lamenting dead friends before going on to regret his own mistakes, the storied seven felonies that mean his life could basically end after one slip-up, Jamie Foxx gingerly cooing the chorus.

And so the rest of the album goes, excising the weak and awkward bits that marred his other records. T.I.'s confidence seems effortless and second-nature, his self-aggrandizement turning relentless and convincing. If anything has been lost in his metamorphosis into aristocratically vicious Machiavellian monarch, it's his uncertainty, the touchingly awkward humility that crept into his voice when he begged neglected kids for forgiveness on Trap Muzik's "I Still Luv You".

But that stuff had to go-- as did the ugly bursts of misogyny that would occasionally surface. When he talks to women now, he's conversational and courtly. On "Why You Wanna", he leans over the languid house pianos from Crystal Waters' "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)": "What, he think he too fresh to show you that you're the best?/ Compliment you on ya intellect and treat you with respect?" On "Goodlife", he pulls off two miracles at once: making the Neptunes' recent schmaltzy Vegas-lounge glide sound good (not even Jay-Z managed that too often) and beating guest Common at his own fondly melancholy nostalgia game: "I was born into poverty, raised in the sewage/ Streets will always be a part of me; they made me the truest." And on "I'm Straight" he's right at home on, lazily bragging over lilting 1970s-soul flutes and wispy guitar twirls, next to a hard, greasy B.G., and a gasping, larger-than-life Jeezy. Even the album's most glaring misstep, the weak r&b track "Hello", finds T.I. talking warmly to the girl who left him, which is nice. He can do that. He doesn't have to prove anything anymore.