Max B Went Away for 16 Years and Came Back Ageless

Twenty years after flooding the mixtape market with songs like “Fuck Ya Butt,” Max B tried his hand at mythmaking. Casting aside his famous pig’s giggle in the video for his and French Montana’s comeback single, “MAWA (Make America Wavy Again),” a solemn Max stared into the distance as the camera panned out to reveal a bejeweled crown of thorns atop his head. It’s a touch of self-seriousness unbecoming of Wavy Crocket, a living blog-era relic that, frankly, only a New Jersey district attorney cared enough to crucify. Max supplies a less cliché summation on their second new single, “Whippin That Wave”: “I came in a degenerate, left it as an icon.” It’s a fitting bar for rap’s greatest living paradox. It’s probably even an understatement. At age 47, Max is both an old head and an emerging artist, a legend, yet entirely new to Zoomers. Before the internet and after it. Following a 16-year prison sentence for manslaughter, Max B is out, and, thanks to rap’s cultural and musical evolution, somehow—miraculously—bigger than ever.

Max B’s resurrection began with a figurative death. As he started his prison sentence in 2009, East Coast street rap receded from mainstream dominance as the peak of the blog era democratized sounds, audience, and access. Earlier that year, a guy once known as a teen soap opera character named Wheelchair Jimmy was becoming the biggest rap star in the world, mapping his conquest on the sonic fault lines of Houston and just about any other climate that struck his fancy. X—once and still known as Twitter—helped trends and sounds travel as quickly as misinformation. The need for linear song structures evaporated along with rigid pretenses of regional identity. Harlem’s ASAP Rocky could sound like Three 6 Mafia and Drake could sound like UGK. Or Omarion. New York no longer needed to sound like “New York.” Max B never sounded like anything but himself.

“Max B never sounded like anything but himself.”

For the most part, that holds up on Max and French’s Coke Wave 3.5: Narcos, released last Friday. Here, the two continue surfing the wave they began riding 17 years ago, swerving through subgenres with idiosyncratic imagination and surprising finesse. On tracks like “Whippin That Wave,” they package a classic Nas instrumental with a riff on the same I Monster hook Lupe Fiasco used for “Daydream.” Elsewhere, for tracks like “Ever Since U Left Me,” they pair KC and the Sunshine Band’s disco with a “One Mic” interpolation for a petty anti-ex anthem that feels like French’s “Return of the Mack, Pt. 2.” Kudos to Max for having the audacity to say a chick called him scrumptious. While his voice is decidedly more jagged than in the past, his rhymes can be as cutting as ever, and groovy tracks like “I Don’t Know” and “Tease Me” prove he’s almost as wavy as ever. And, in a post-genre internet milieu, more current. Genre-hopping might be the norm, but by the time the mainstream caught up, Max had perfected it. He mastered the whole internet thing, too.

As WorldStarHipHop and Instagram were taking off, Max’s SMACK DVD interviews were already legendary. Bearing a conspicuous perm and a chain heftier than the ones that bound him, he could turn a minor shit-talking session into an act of barbershop theater; he looked better than you, and whatever you did, he was going to do the opposite. Moments like those stuck with a generation. Namely, folks like Fetty Wap, who used some of his first moments of post-prison freedom to recite a famous Max B quote. He knew every word as if they were lyrics: “What these niggas do, I don't do, man. These niggas go this way, I go the other way.” These days, everyone’s trying to go the other way. Rappers like Kevin Gates and Soulja Boy traffic in virality. But it’s a path well trodden by Max, whose bizarro charisma gives him infinitely GIF-able electricity; if Future can be SENSATIONAL, Max can be STUPENDOUS.

Unbound by genre conventions, label structures or, really, expectations, Max is free to spread the weirdest music to as many people as he wants—and his own antics will only accelerate the process. Things like “age” don’t feel like a hindrance. With Max, it feels more like clarity. As other 50-year-old rappers are caught in arrested development or the throes of career reinvention, Max has a chance to simply resume what he started. Except on the biggest stage of his career. And for stylists like him rap has never been more hospitable. Even if Max were a traditionalist MC, the emergence of Roc Marciano and Griselda—as well as D-Block’s Verzuz triumph—would have made the zeitgeist a hospitable world for less wavy wave. A democratized internet means anything legitimately compelling can work. If “Pound Town” can hit the Hot 100, why can’t “Fuck Ya Butt”? Combining absurdity with a style that mirrors the era—or, rather, an era that mirrors himself—Max has a propulsive, self-refueling surfboard equipped to ride tsunamis.

In a perverse, ironic way, Max’s imprisonment might have been a form of liberation. As social media eclipsed DVDs, a prison cell might have kept Max from going the way of the dinosaur. Instead, he can go the way of Encino Man. In the 1992 flick, Brendan Fraser’s character is a caveman who was frozen when he left his village to make fire. In his own time, Max B was iced out because he, too, was making fire. Industry feuds left him without access to his publishing, and the limits of his era left him without a road to commercial relevance. Encino Man was thawed out by some loser high school kids, and after a period of adjustment, he was able to live out quite a wavy existence. Had he not been frozen, he would’ve died in the Ice Age. In the midst of Max’s own adjustment period, those current-day designer shoes feel a little awkward, and, admittedly, he could work to operate more comfortably within his new vocal range. Still, Max stands at the center of parallel universes: a Gen X MC who’s somehow an emblem of the modern era. It’s not exactly his time, but he’s still got the chance to help define it.

Or just ride the wave.

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