Lil’ Flip – Certified (featuring Gudda Gudda)

flipArtist: Lil’ Flip

Album: Certified

Genre: Hip-Hop/Rap

Label: Real Talk Ent.

 

1. 1 Fly Boy

2. Bosses Make It Rain

3. Roll It

4. Smoke And Ride

5. She So Fly (featuring J. Franks)

6. I Love Cali

7. Down South Legends

8. Me And U Baby

9. Ether

10. I Keep It Street All Day

11. Certified

12. If U Trappin’

13. G Tales

14. The Best

 

I have to admire Lil’ Flip for the way he approaches the rap game. This guy has sold hundreds of thousands of records and he is one of the most modest rappers ever. Many platinum selling spitters are recording in huge studios with big name engineers while racking up studio costs that are more than the record totals they’ll sell, but not Flip. This dude records track after track in a backroom with a studio set up that might be pushing one thousand dollars…if that.

 

Not by any surprise, Lil’ Flip comes back to us with his Certified album that features Gudda Gudda. If you haven’t heard about Gudda Gudda yet then let me fill you in. Gudda is an artist signed to Lil’ Wayne’s camp Young Money Entertainment along the likes of Drake and Mack Maine, but has been recently dropping a lot of heat with Lil’ Flip and my new favorite R&B artist Essay Potna. Overall the two of them brought us a pretty solid product this time around and I was very impressed.

 

The album started off too shaky for my liking. It had a pretty lame intro and the first song, Bosses Make It Rain, had a played out concept and lame commercial lyrics. If this track came out in ’04 it would have been a street anthem, but it is a little dated. Although…the beat was knocking! The song Roll It is where the album really picks up and gets going. You have to laugh at the beginning of the song because they mix in a scene from the movie Grandma’s Boy as a skit to set the mood. Followed by that skit we get a hilarious reference to the movie Half Baked by Flip when he says, “call me the guy on the couch.” Easily one of the best smoking anthems I’ve heard this year. The songs She’s So Fly and I Love Cali are the best two songs on the album. She’s So Fly has a very fresh beat and nice commercial hook that’ll get you to listen to this track a few times in a row. I Love Cali is an amazing song because its got that West Coast feel to it and that West Coast whistle on the beat that makes you just want to roll around in your car bumping the track—I love it! Me And U Baby was also another great track and another ill girlfriend anthem like She’s So Fly. Flip had a perfect flow over the nice and smooth beat and the sample flipped for it was nice.

 

The second half of the album gets really serious…apart from the first half where there were lady songs and weed-laugh tracks. Carrying the end of the load are some serious trap songs like Certified, Are You Trappin’ and G Tales. These songs are for the serious fans and help the album finish on a strong note.

 

The overall production on this project was well polished. I didn’t hear one beat that didn’t compete with beats from the albums of Mims, Rick Ross, or Mike Jones. There weren’t many album features for this duo’s album, but I can understand why they kept what features they had in house—the formula worked well. One thing I couldn’t understand about the project is why they didn’t have any features from Essay Potna on any of the hooks…seriously! Essay Potna just dropped the hook on Mike Jones’ hit single from his new album The Voice, why not do one in camp for his boy Flip? I guess I won’t ever know why.

 

All in all, this was a pretty fly album. I thought it had more of an ATL bounce to it than a Houston, Texas feel, but I guess that comes with the collaboration with Gudda Gudda. This drop is a great pick up for fans heavy into Lil’ Flip or Young Money Entertainment and I would definitely recommend this album to you. Gudda Gudda held his own, but he is by far under Lil’ Flip’s skill category—it easily shows on this album. Nevertheless, that isn’t enough to stop me from listening to this album again.

 

Score: 7/10

Written By: Brandon “Venamis” Folsom — www.twitter.com/venamis

 

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5 Responses to “Lil’ Flip – Certified (featuring Gudda Gudda)”

  1. (UTG) Grant says:

    dude, lil flip makes some tight stuff. should be a sweet release. def. pumped to hear it

  2. JPG says:

    do you listen to the lyrics of this, shits played out, too predicatable seems like you just wantin to hear some shit with good beats and nice hooks, at one point in the review you critize flip for having “lame commercial lyrics” and in the same paragraph you say another song has a “nice commercial hook”
    your review is very misleading to what this album is about

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