ALBUM REVIEW - U Gotta Feel Me

04/15/2004

By Dan Leroy

Like many of his fellow self-made Southerners, Lil’ Flip has hip-hop hustle impossible to knock. The Houston native and protege of the late DJ Screw is building a business empire just out of his teens, and his third major label outing is a reasonable, drawled demand for acknowledgment. Except that these two discs lose sight of what made “Da Freestyle King” more than just a regional novelty, spreading the musicianship and occasionally levelheaded lyrics of his last effort, Undaground Legend, even thinner amidst blinging bluster that confirms Flip’s boast, “I take 15 minutes to drop a track.” Even the presence of Ludacris, on the crunkified “Bring the Pain,” and Cam’ron (“All I Know”) can’t give those tossed-off tunes an extra dimension, so U Gotta Feel Me stays most interesting at the margins: the sweet soul “Sunshine,” which declares “I’ll treat you like milk/I’ll do nothin’ but spoil you,” and, at the other extreme, the chopped and screwed remix of “Dem Boyz,” a link to Flip’s underground lineage, its beats ominously slowed and suspended in cough syrup. You can certainly feel such diversions–they just can’t carry this overloaded, underwritten double album.