Guest Blogger: Alex N2

The rap artist I have been listening to for probably the longest is T.I. I started listening to him when I was in 6th grade and as a senior in high school now I still listen to him quite often. He is a rapper from Atlanta, Georgia. One of my favorite albums he has put together was released towards the end of September 2008 known as Paper Trail. The album has many feels to it, some songs promote listeners to feel joy he is feeling, other songs show some of the pain he is feeling, it is a pretty well balanced album. T.I.’s songs can be pretty comparable with the rapper Jay-Z’s songs. A lot of their songs are about struggles they have gone through, both when they were dealing drugs on the streets and talking about their lives as mainstream artists. One memorable quote spoken by T.I. goes, “God will take you through hell, just to get you to heaven.” This quote is memorable because it was said after he had been issued a jail sentence for having unlicensed weapons back in 2008. He is saying that although he is entering a dark time of his life, it won’t last forever and it will only be good things once it’s all over with. Many people have been saying that his album Paper Trail deserves a higher rating than the “B+” rating given by Entertainment Weekly in their review about the album which was written by Margeaux Watson. I completely agree, Paper Trail is one of the best albums I have heard, there is not a single song that I skip when I listen to it, it definitely deserves a higher rating. For people that like hip-hop and rap, I would surely recommend T.I., but I probably wouldn’t suggest his music to those who aren’t a fan of this genre of music. He truly is a great artist and is very experienced at what he does. Over the quite of few years that I have been listening to him he has not changed much at all, he stays true to the way he writes and they way he speaks his voice. Since I started listening to him about 6 or 7 years ago, I have become a fan of many different rappers, only to shortly move away from listening to them as their music started to change with their age, but T.I. is the only artist that I still listen to after this many years of listening to rap, to me he is definitely considered one of the best to ever pick up the mic.