Big Sean is a man now. The diminutive Detroit MC has spent much of his nearly 20-year career operating as a horny punchline merchant — the rap Glenn Quagmire, if you will — infamously making entire songs about his love of ass while riding co-signs from Kanye West and JAY-Z.
There have been moments where Sean has flirted with living up to the hype as a teenage signee to Ye’s G.O.O.D. Music. His third album Dark Sky Paradise, released in 2015, was a stratospheric increase in quality and maturity over everything that had come before, while his 2012 mixtape Detroit also proved there was some meat on his rap bones.
But for the most part, when you consider that his contemporaries are Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, Sean was more Scrappy-Doo than Godzilla.
Now the grand old age of 36, Big Sean is a father, in a long-term relationship with Jhené Aiko and has made wellness and spirituality a core tenet of his being in 2024.
These are the themes that encompass the vast majority of his sixth studio album Better Me Than You. Growth and improvement recur throughout the lengthy 21-song project and its many guest stars including Kodak Black, Gunna and Cash Cobain.
The three standout tracks on the album — “Million Pieces” featuring Teyana Taylor, Larry June and DJ Premier, the Charlie Wilson-assisted “Break the Cycle” and “On Up” — share similarities in that they all deal with weighty themes of fatherhood and generational pain, while also making use of unusual samples: “Royalty” by Gang Starr, a Gap Band classic and “Get On Up” by ’90s babymakers Jodeci, respectively.
The songs link Sean’s own father’s failed dreams of becoming an actor to the rapper’s aspirations for his own son and the positive relationship he hopes they can share as he grows up.
“Million Pieces” also hears Sean weary of the fame he cooed over on his debut Finally Famous, rapping with a heavy sigh: “I used to want to be a millionaire for, shit, like a million reasons / And then it came with a million leeches that want that many pieces / Lawyers, taxes, state taxes / Agents, assistants, managers, business managers / Fees and damages / Plus somebody else, to make sure that they’re not scammin’ us.”
The way the song is in communication with the hookless “On Up,” where Sean raps about building empires as a Black man amidst the tumult of 21st century America, is the most interesting material of his career, showing a new level of nuance, storytelling and introspection.
As with most contemporary rap albums, Better Me Than You is far too long and while more cohesive than rival efforts, there is not enough depth, intrigue or tension to justify a runtime of over an hour. The guests, too, struggle to make their mark. Gunna phones in a verse on “It Is What It Is,” Cash Cobain lends his signature, sexually-charged sound to “Get You Back” because he’s in-demand and Bryson Tiller‘s appearance on “This N That” leaves you asking why he’s there in the first place.
