Time Served (Deluxe)

Time Served (Deluxe)

Few rappers in any era have merged hip-hop’s roots as dance music and its capacity for confessional writing like Moneybagg Yo. The husky-voiced, technically precise MC has made a career Trojan horsing stark personal revelations into songs designed to dominate nightclubs and rattle out of car speakers. His third album, 2020’s Time Served, flexes this dual-track approach as well as Bagg’s versatility as a collaborator, pairing him with ascendant superstars like Lil Baby, fellow Tennessean Blac Youngsta, and Big 30, a local upstart he signed and helped develop. Time Served is the sound of an approach finally, totally unified. Bagg was raised in Memphis in the wake of Three 6 Mafia’s breakthrough, and his music is dotted with evidence of their influence, especially in his willingness to let menace and lightheartedness come together on a single track. But he was also molded after—and mentored by—Yo Gotti, a star from the city’s next wave of talent. Where Juicy J et al. weaponized the rough edges of their style to make each joke sound improvised and each threat sound more pointed, Gotti prioritized polish and sheen. The effect of synthesizing these approaches is to lull the listener into expecting a single thought, a single tone to run through an entire verse or song—while Bagg instead prepares to dart off in a half-dozen different directions. There are points on Time Served when Bagg grows so ruminative it feels almost intrusive to listen, as on “Cold Shoulder,” where he touches on how having a daughter has transformed his life, but also on an array of betrayals he eventually sounds too exhausted to litigate in full. Elsewhere, songs like the Future duet “Federal Fed” are so propulsive as to seem unstoppable. Whether delving deep into Moneybagg Yo’s psyche or sinking deeper into a leather VIP booth, Time Served is evidence of the artist’s belief that the good and bad in life are not only necessary counterbalances, but truly inextricable from one another.

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