On September 21st, 2005, I flew out of Dulles Airport to Sevilla, Spain for my fall 2005 semester abroad. I knew the airport by heart after having worked there as a baggage handler for the past year. My flight departed from concourse A, but I had some time to kill so I made a special trip on the mobile lounge to concourse C because that's where the California Pizza Kitchen & the record store were, & the new David Banner album had just dropped. It's quite possible that I played the CD in my discman on repeat for the entire flight, or close to it.
I tell this story by way of explaining why it's hard for me to be fully objective about this album. I just have so many rose-tinted memories associated with it. In some ways, Certified feels like a time capsule of everything you needed to make a mainstream rap album in 2005: A Lil Jon beat & feature; a Twista feature; a few contributions from Jazze Pha (what happened to that guy?); a Mr. Collipark-produced snap song with the Ying-Yang whisper flow; a rap-rock collaboration (Linkin Park & Jay-Z's joint project was huge the previous year). On the other hand, the album is infused with a deep soulfulness & social conscience. David Banner was the DMX of the south: an almost cartoonishly aggressive, macho presence who could turn on a dime into authentic spiritual anguish. On Certified, the former Southern University student government president gave me what I craved from rap at the time: cultured, politically aware, unapologetic hood shit.
"I'ma come to the crib, I'ma flood my block/I'ma ride downtown yelling 'FUCK TRENT LOTT'/They done raped grandmama, they done took our land/Now they wonder why a n**** don't give a hot damn"
Banner always had a thing for guitars, but this is the most guitar-driven & rock-inflected his music ever got. He produces 10 out of 17 songs, & of those self-produced joints, all but 2 feature prominent guitar parts. Only 1 feels derivative of his prior work--"My Life," which wants to be "Cadillacs on 22s" pt. 2 before "Cadillacs on 22s Pt. 2," but still features an interesting lyric about betrayal. Of the Banner beats, the scorching, Craig Love-assisted opener "Lost Souls," quoted above, is one of my favorites, as well as "2 Fingers," which manages to find a unique sound with stomps & handclaps overdubbed what sounds like 50 times in place of drums (Banner reuses this trick on "Thinking of You") plus driving acoustic guitar chords & wordless backup vocals. Sadly, the lyrics on the latter song don't reach the heights of the beat--it's another one of Banner's desultory pimp anthems.
Banner took an interesting approach to sequencing this album--rather than interspersing songs on different topics, he organized it into 4 rough chunks. Starting with "2 Fingers," we get 4 songs about women in a row, just like at the end of the album we get 4 conscious joints in a row. The quarter of Certified preoccupied with sex & love is the section that comes the closest to making me lose interest. At best, Banner doesn't have much interesting to say on these topics. At worst, we get "Play," which rides the short-lived Ying-Yang Twins "Wait" whisper-flow wave, which aged horribly. I absolutely acknowledge that the song is meant for the strip club, not backpacker headphones. Still, I doubt the production--with the vocals mixed so prominent as to overpower everything else--would sound good anywhere, & today the whole thing is just embarrassingly dated.
Another interesting beat is Get Cool's contribution, "On Everything" ft. Twista, which samples "King's Motorcade" from Coming to America while also paying tribute to the flyness of HBCU marching bands (which also had a bit of a moment around this time thanks to the movie Drumline). Then there's Westside, which is one of the album's jewels. Over a G-funk-influenced beat by Maestro, Banner pays tribute to...well, pretty much every west coast rapper he could think of. To hear an artist so fixated on his own region show so much love to another region is heartwarming. There's no ulterior motive, he's not trying to hit any kind of lick, he just loves west coast hiphop & wants us to know it. Westside is pure love, & I wish there were more songs like it in general.
Despite the abundance of features (15 guest rappers across 17 tracks, not even counting the guest singers), Banner never gets lost in the mix, & that's a testament to his strength of personality. The features themselves are stellar. I've got a soft spot for bellowing giant MGJ on "Gangsta Walk"; Boosie, who floats over an uptempo beat full of orchestral chops on "Ain't Got Nothing"; & BG's shivery, ghoulish flow on the horror-esque "Bloody War," full of eerie portamento synths. Talib Kweli shows up on the dead prez collab "Ridin'" trying a flow that just doesn't work, but I respect any verse that mentions Bunchy Carter. But the award for best feature goes to Banner's old Crooked Lettaz partner Kamikaze, who makes a too-short appearance on "X-ed." (Not to be confused with the Too Short appearance on "Take Your.") I don't know much about Kamikaze & why he & Banner parted ways, but they always had great chemistry & I would have liked to see more work from the duo.
Nowadays I don't find myself drawn to records that have as much unbridled testosterone as this one does, but that probably says more about me than about the album. For me this is by far the best David Banner album, & the only one where he struck the perfect balance of conscious & street, without being too ratchet for the conscious heads (like he was before) or too woke for the streets (like he became after). This is the sweet spot, & I'll still spin it pretty often to this day. I usually skip tracks 5-7 though.
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