Say what you want about Trina, but she sure is consistent. On her 2000 debut, the Miami madam proclaimed she was Da Baddest Bitch and last year she reaffirmed that she was Still Da Baddest. With the music world still mourning the passing of Michael Jackson, it makes sense that Trina would use the King of Pop’s 1987 opus, Bad, as inspiration for her latest mixtape, Who’s Bad?
MJ fans need not worry about Trina trying to flip any of his classic beats, as she keeps her sound focused on Southern bounce and only evokes Michael’s crotch-grabbin “badness” for the disc. On her current single, “That’s My Attitude,” Trina pops her color and puts all other “rap bitches” in check before drawing a line in the sand with the cocky “Baddest of All Times.” Trina goes on to pop even more shit on the old school-powered “Stop Hatin’,” where she spits, “Toucan Sam, I’m the shit follow ya nose/Fresh off the brick call me the new blow/Since you can’t keep up with my retard flow/Retard dough, money in the bank/You haters still wonder why my ship won’t sink/I’m like a combat missile blow up ya whole tank.”
The problem with consistency is that sometimes it can trail off into complacency. Throughout the course of the 24-cut mixtape, Trina redundantly reiterates her status as the baddest chick with the biggest bubble. If it’s not that, she talking about her cash flow, which is lumped into a trio of similarly titled tracks—“Get Dat Money,” “Get Ya Money Up (Freestyle)” and “Get Ya Money Girl,” featuring Lil Wayne. Trina shows more range with cuts like the cautionary “Thug Life” and the personal manifesto “My Testimony,” but too bad she spends most of her time focused on telling us Who’s Bad? —Anslem Samuel