I’ll admit it: I wasn’t feeling T.I.’s first album, I’m Serious. I also wasn’t feeling Trap Muzik or Urban Legend (except for the Rubber Band Man and Bring ‘em out joints). In fact, it wasn’t until King where I started to realize that he had crazy rhyming skill, and then I started to think that maybe Ludacris wasn’t the best thing about the South.

Really, for me, I was never into that brand of Hip Hop; I dismissed those rappers as thick-accented drunks who only went platinum because they sold their shit out of their cars when there was no market. I thought that Ludacris ruled the south; plus I could understand what he was saying. Since then, I have not really become a Southern Hip Hop fan, but I like to think that I understand it enough to appreciate it.

Anyways, Ludacris is still great, but I now know that T.I. better represents that Southern shit that I once despised. His new album, T.I. vs. T.I.P. is fire.

The theme is basically him (T.I.) fighting against his brash, gangster side (T.I.P). Heh, It would have been funny to throw Q-Tip on the album and have T.I. try to claim his name back. Anyways, this inner conflict thing is drawn out through the skits, and is referred to in the songs. It’s hot. The production is on-point, and the unintelligible T.I.-ness is kept to a minimum. The features are also well-done; the Jay-Z verse is straight sick and Eminem’s verse describes getting his car candy-painted in a fake Southern accent – very slick. There are some mediocre songs however, namely the dated-sounding Nelly song. The best tracks on the album are saved for the end, after the ‘conflict’ is supposedly resolved. Tell ‘em I Said That is a definite classic.

Overall I am loving this shit, and it made me put the rest of his albums on my iPod to check and see if I changed my opinion of them (note: still not feeling them). I give this album 4 ‘You know what it is’s out of 5.