It's not often you can trace an entire subgenre back to a single album, & you're even less likely to love the album in question but dislike pretty much everything it inspired. Both are true for Deliverance & me. The album is responsible for the plague of whiteboy country rap that has given us such figures as Colt Ford, The Lacs, Adam Calhoun & (ugh) Ryan Upchurch. But before any of that happened, this album hit me at exactly the right time, & I still uphold it as a masterpiece of production & lyrical dexterity.
Country & rap had crossed over before, but never had any white artist approaching mainstream status rapped over harmonicas ("Jimmy Mathis") & banjos ("Comin' Round"), dueted with a country singer, ("She Tried"), or rapped about fishing & deer hunting ("Nowhere"). Unlike the cynical, conservative dog-whistle racist shit that followed in his wake, when Bubba pivoted from the more mainstream Southern rap sounds of his debut into rustic, rootsy territory, he did it with an open heart & a spirit of authenticity.
The other half of what Bubba terms "this musical marriage" is, of course, Timbaland, an indispensable part of Deliverance's success. Tim manages to embrace Bubba's folksy direction while keeping his own trademarks intact: breezy wordless vocals, sound effects, unusual percussion with lots of clicks & clacks, & that inimitable Timbaland bounce. It's hard to pick favorite beats out of such a grip of stone-cold classics, but I've always loved "Warrant," with its anxious bass played by Thaddeaus Tribbett & Larry Gold's big string arrangement. Those strings show up again on the orchestral fanfare "Overcome" along with a bold brass section in a musical tribute to southern college marching bands. Of course, we can't forget about ONP, who produce 4 tracks. The album intro interpolates Cream's "I Feel Free" in a clever flip with the refrain "not yet free." The closer "Back in the Mud" is an audacious 4-on-the-floor number that owes more to avant-garde dance music than hiphop. But the best ONP production is "Like It Or Not," a smoky, deep southern funk tune with a jaw-dropping horn section by Dungeon Family mainstays Hornz Unlimited. Honestly, the only dud on the whole album is "Take a Load Off"--not sure if Bubba & Tim were aiming for the dance floor or what, but they missed--& on a 62-minute album, that's a damn good killer-to-filler ratio.
All Bubba & Timbaland's best work comes together on the album's 2 best songs, the triumphant, hopeful "Comin' Round," & the pensive "Nowhere." On "Comin' Round," over a bluegrass Yonder Mountain String Band sample augmented by a glorious programmed string section, Bubba uses an effortlessly complex rhyme scheme to discuss how he seems his place in the musical landscape. "There is no king for the throne I seek," he muses, before painting a picture of a typical Bubba Sparxxx listener: a rural-dwelling 14-year-old boy, grown up too fast from an unwanted baby, forced to provide for his family. "He listens to his own, can't relate to none other [...] If Daddy wasn't ready, all it took was one rubber/to prevent the pain that his family done suffered/thankfully his son is a real come-upper/'cuz there's gon' be something on the table come supper/there, the plight of my people is uncovered."
On "Nowhere," the subject matter is similar but the mood is more somber. Here instead of upbeat, the strings are morose & apprehensive; instead of celebrating his connection with people, Bubba finds himself worrying about his legacy, a common theme in his work. After offering some specific details about his impoverished upbringing, he focuses on the inevitable comparisons the listening public will make between him & Eminem--& he already seems to have decided he will fall short, perhaps due to regional bias: "All my plans of being viewed as something special, more than just 'the other one'/will vanish into vapors of the plague the South has suffered from." A few bars later, he predicts the flood of white emcees that came in his & Marshall's wake: "There's gon' be a million more, who knows if they'll be worth a damn."
Turns out, unfortunately, Bubba's fears were justified. I linked this Rolling Stone piece in my last Bubba Sparxxx writeup, but I think it bears repeating for Bubba's take on the racist "hick-hop" movement that took its inspiration from his sophomore album. "My heart was always in, ‘Man, these people aren’t as different as they think,' [...] My goal was always to build a bridge between people. [...] It wasn’t trying to say, ‘Let’s take this and go have our own party.’" Bubba, who never displayed the confederate flag & made a point to work with almost exclusively Black collaborators on his early albums, has become an outlier in the world he had a major hand in creating.
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