Goon Affiliated (Deluxe Version)

If you accept and embrace Plies for what he is — in all of his gooned-out glory — then you will find Goon Affiliated to be his strongest release to date. So what is Plies all about, really? Well, he’s all about snarly attitude and obnoxious delivery, but more crucially, like R. Kelly, he plays off the things that people said when they’re making fun of him. People say Plies is dumb, but there’s self-awareness to his dumbness. “Rob Myself,” “Awesome” and “Model” are too knowing to be truly dumb. They use dumbness to make a joke about rappers who take themselves too seriously, and overwork their rhymes. At the same time, Plies is having a blast, and he’s a blast to listen to. From “Awesome”: “Met her at the Cheese Cake, ran through her same day / Me know he sweet, we call him Kool-Aid.” Even if you can’t get behind the lyrics, rest assured that this is one of the year’s finest slabs of Atlanta rap production. Zaytoven’s “Bruh Bruh” and Fatboi’s “Model” are among each producer’s finest tracks, while Clinton Sparks’ ingenious “She Got It Made” pulls gangsta funk from the most unlikely source: Rupert Holmes’ 1979 soft rock hit “The Pina Colada Song.”