Gucci Mane & V-Nasty: BAYTL

Whatever your opinion on Kreayshawn’s n-word spewing sidekick V-Nasty (to my mind, the biggest trouble lies with the impressionable white audience most likely to pay attention), you can’t deny her brazen energy. Nasty embodies the so-harsh-it’s-almost-funny realism of Oakland, Calif.’s darkest corners as well as anyone in recent memory. With Gucci Mane she shares a stilted flow and a predisposition to childish, self-indulgent wordplay that sometimes yields unexpected, effective results. But BAYTL lives and dies with V-Nasty. An increasingly distant Gucci pops in sporadically with a half-gem (“Money stickin’ out my pockets like a porcupine”), otherwise he’s barely there. Meanwhile, Nasty’s either spitting Tyler-level nonsense-isms (“No need for a preacher/Pray to me, I’ll be your father”) or, well, not (“I’m way better than the average/In my city, I ain’t nothin’ but a savage”). BAYTL’s saving grace is Zaytoven; the producer’s skeletal, death-sick beats are an ideal conduit for the diminutive MC’s fuck-the-world psychoses. (2 out of 5 stars)