With his viscous, authoritative baritone, impenetrable Southern drawl, and hard-earned street smarts, BigXthaPlug’s trap tales possess candy-painted Texas cool. Most importantly, the Dallas rapper is a dramatist. He taps into his inner playwright on “Dream,” a cut from his debut album Amar, where he documents the everyday misfortune he experienced when he couldn’t afford Popeyes. His granular details evoke the type of desperation you can taste: “Was so fucking broke couldn’t even buy me a biscuit/Couldn’t clear out my throat, ’cause the drink was $2.50.”
As heartfelt as it is hyper-specific, the song captures the best of Amar, a new project named after BigX’s son. While it’s sometimes stifled by repetition and lapses in imagination, the album stands as a compelling exercise in cinematic street rap. Over 13 tracks, BigX swerves through solemn R&B and soul samples, dismissive boasts, and lucid memories, letting loose percussive flows and tightly coiled rhyme schemes—the kind that can only come from a true technician. Like some of the best writers, he can be convincingly charming, poignant, or irate. Often, he’s all three at once.
On “Safehouse,” he slides across militaristic percussion and a foreboding piano loop, unloading menacing one-liners that would make Dirty Harry blush. Meanwhile, on “Bacc to the Basics,” he reflects on a trap survivor’s baser instincts before lamenting the roots of a fractured familial bond. With his penchant for piling writerly details and altering the velocity and intensity of his tonal inflections, BigX’s best songs bring an emotional immediacy that’s impossible to fake.
But between the death threats and daily struggles, he’s having fun here, too. On “Texas,” he coasts over Southern blues as he serves up a playful yet vivid glimpse at the sociology of his home state. It’s not as anthemic as Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” or Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris’ “Welcome to Atlanta,” but its easygoing sensibility reflects the parking lot pimpin’ of its inspiration. There’s a disarming warmth that makes you feel his sincere admiration for the place that raised him.
While BigX’s rhymes are usually sharp, sometimes, he inadvertently dulls them down by losing specificity. This renders some of his trench bars bland; they end up carrying the redundancy of countless other rags-to-riches platitudes, like the celebratory come-up of “Change.” (“Remember them days being a hood superstar/Now the whole city saying my name.”)
As his longest project yet—2020’s Bacc From the Dead and 2022’s Big Stepper were just six songs each—BigX sometimes struggles to carry the weight of the extra material. Some moments resemble generic versions of tracks other artists infused with more individuality, like “Thick,” which includes a drab hook that’s got all the originality of a Google search for “twerk song.” It’s even more glaring that Erica Banks, who’s featured on the track alongside Tay Money, already made a better rendition of the same thing last year.
There are some unexpected production flourishes here, but on the whole, Amar doesn’t do much to elevate the rapper it’s hosting. BigX is still figuring out how to help himself, too. Pairing a screenwriter’s knack for harnessing histrionics with a freestyler’s ability to stack intricate rhymes atop emphatic punchlines, he always knows how to deliver captivating individual verses. The next step is merging them with less predictable song structures and more memorable hooks (as is, they often feel like placeholders meant to bridge the gap between one verse and the next). But that’s fine; after all, he’s only dropped three projects. With his storytelling know-how and mic presence, BigXthaPlug is worth a re-up.