Nearly a year old, “Pop That” is wisely and somewhat desperately included- there’s no way Excuse My French will result in anybody’s first-time legal ownership of the song, though you figure its 37 million YouTube views will yield something.

Otherwise, any French Montana verse is the sound of time being killed bar by bar. Some decent one-liners are sprinkled throughout, and somehow, hearing him do his trademark “hah?” is about the only thing that never becomes tiresome.

But left to his own devices, he raps the same way the guy in your freshman dorm played guitar, absent-mindedly moving from one unrelated riff to the next, fixating on familiar phrasings, and just basically annoying the hell out of you. As proven by “Stay Schemin’', “I’m a Coke Boy', “Pop That', “Shot Caller” or anything else that’s willed its way into becoming a hit, when surrounded by the right team, Montana can impress himself on a track without stealing it. The bigger issue is that unlike any of the aforementioned, Montana has no real idea of how to put a song together. Which itself isn’t a problem, as Montana’s emotional blankness puts him within the range of Chief Keef, but whereas the latter is fueled by nihilistic defiance, French just sounds listless and bored. But whereas Rozay has developed a character through vivid imagination and exaggeration*,* Montana doesn’t express enough individuality in his music to even be a caricature. Which isn’t a huge problem, since he’s often been welcome on Rick Ross’ fantasy island. Nobody that Montana threatens, fucks, robs, or peddles bricks to is granted any sort of humanity. You can get all of that from his Twitter feed his actual music just ends up putting his shortcomings in sharp relief. His flow conflates loopy rapping and off-key singing similar to Future, but Pluto somehow felt more earthbound than Excuse My French. But you can understand what people see in French Montana, as he does give you the raw material of a 2013 rap icon: fluent in regional microtrends and stylistically fluid enough to involve himself in them, 'New York' enough to keep local tastemakers satisfied, all while carrying an air of self-aware absurdity. This isn’t all that surprising considering that his 2012 mixtape Mac & Cheese 3 achieved the same result as loudly and expensively as its commercially available follow-up.

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