Miami's DJ Khaled doesn't really do much. He doesn't rap. He doesn't sing. He doesn't cut or scratch. He does produce tracks under his Beat Novocain alias, but not that often; he's responsible for only two of the tracks on We the Best, his sophomore album. Mostly, he just incessantly screams dumb catchphrases, and he doesn't even do that particularly well; one of the reasons that Lil Wayne and Khaled's Da Drought 3 is the best mixtape in years is Lil Wayne's decision to leak it to the internet before Khaled had a chance to yell all over it. Still, for someone so markedly devoid of talent, Khaled managed to throw together a surprisingly decent debut album last year. Listennn...The Album was a state-of-the-art rap compilation. Khaled apparently has ins with half of rap's biggest stars, and his disc probably could've coasted by on star-power alone. But he also employed most of Florida's better production teams, including Cool & Dre and the Runners. And since these guys all work from the same basic sonic templates, Listennn was satisfyingly cohesive for a thrown-together mixtape of its kind, and it made a strong case for the epically plastic Miami synth-rap sound that was ascendant at the time.
We the Best plainly attempts to follow up on the formula established by Listennn. First single "We Takin' Over" is every bit the equal of its Listennn predecessor, the worldbeating posse cut "Holla At Me". The new single wrangles an all-star lineup, boasting an ebulliently overblown Akon chorus and sandwiching a few just-OK verses from Rick Ross and Fat Joe and Birdman between two bravura star-turns. T.I. starts things off with brisk efficiency, and Lil Wayne masterfully caps the song off with deranged verve. The track builds beautifully to Wayne's climactic verse, and his performance would've been star-making if he weren't already a star: "I am the beast/ Feed me rappers or feed me beats..."
If only the rest of We the Best held up to that song's enormous promise. Instead, we get a rapidly diminishing series of rote posse cuts, every guest claiming to be harder and richer than everyone else. When these sorts of swaggering egocentric brag-raps are done with the exhilarated glee of "We Takin' Over", they can be great, even transcendent. But when they're thrown-together and half-assed, as most of the tracks here are, they quickly become oppressively dull. "Brown Paper Bag" thinks it's a drug-dealing epic, but its tinny tuba-fart synths and wailing Bee Gees interpolation feel like overkill, and even Lil Wayne sounds bored and unmotivated. "I'm So Hood" wastes a monstrous Runners sandworm synth-wriggle and an awesomely overblown T-Pain chorus on a bunch of thoroughly anonymous rap verses. "Hit Them Up" is a standard-issue Paul Wall filler-track two years after that might mean something. "New York" recruits the same lineup as the great 2004 Ja Rule single of the same name and fails to capture a single iota of that song's urgency and electricity. The mind-numbing six-minute Bone Thugs-N-Harmony showcase "The Originators" somehow manages to make those great Cleveland sing-rappers sound flat and boring. And when Rick Ross shows up on the first four songs on your album, you're in trouble.