Gunna's Trap classic gets its classic rating.
Technically, SoundSports labeled this project a classic about 18 months ago.
It didn't take long to realize Drip Season 3 was a classic. Everyone was playing it. Everyone started saying drip. And, arguably the most impressive feat, no one got tired of a project that played front-to-back in every car ride.
Around the time of its release, Drip Season 3 was an 'if you know you know' type project.
Gunna wasn't Gunna yet.
Drunk frat boys weren't wrinkling their khaki cargo shorts to dance to his words, and he wasn't a name you saw on playlists or heard on the radio. He was just a promising Young Thug protege until Drip Season 3 dropped and set him up to change every aforementioned statement in this paragraph.
How this works: To even be labeled a classic, a project has to be considered at least a 9 on the 10 point system, so every project that is rated in this series starts at a nine. The remaining point will be calculated by the three categories: impact, replay value and outshining peers.
For example, an album like Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy would get the highest possible score on outshining peers at 100% of 0.33, bumping it from a 9 to a 9.33, and that process would repeat for every category.
Impact
An excerpt from a 2018 reference to Drip Season 3:
"Fun fact: Following the release of Drip Season 3 on February 2nd, the question "what does no cap mean?" jumped from a zero percent interest on Google trends to a 32 percent and increased every week following. Was that fact relevant to the quality of the album? No, but it does show the impact Gunna's breakout project had."
And with that excerpt, I bound myself to give Gunna points in the impact category years later, when in reality, he doesn't deserve any.
Drip Season 3 doesn't introduce a unique flow or an unheralded subject matter. No atmosphere or sound was borrowed by the masses. Nothing new came from this project, except lingo.
In terms of music and influencing other artists, this project doesn't do anything that can be directly attributed to Gunna, unless the popularization of Atlanta lingo like "drip" and "no cap" meant that much to the culture.
Oh, wait what, "drip" and/or "no cap" has been in the top slang words every year since Drip Season 3?
I stand corrected.
Three words just earned Gunna one-third of the points available for this category.
Impact Score: 0.11
Replay Value
Drip Season 3 still runs.
Despite being two years old and already being played to the point of memorization, this project has more replay value than the project he dropped last week.
There's an atmosphere surrounding Drip Season 3 that takes the listener to Gunna's life at that point, and unlike Wunna, the atmosphere is relatable. Again, in 2018, Gunna wasn't Gunna, so his means of flexing weren't coming from a superstar's viewpoint like Drip or Drown 2 or Wunna.
His braggadocia came from a place of someone who knew they were climbing, rather than someone who was already sitting at the top.
For example, on "Spending Addiction", he raps, "Why all the sudden niggas want to be cool? Ain't giving second chances, I'm no fool, I'm out my depression, life been going smooth."
Drip Season 3 was likely the last project Gunna ever had to worry about normal people's problems, and, at times, he perfectly conveyed that feeling of imminent success. The first lines to the hook of "Pedestrian" read like a morning pep talk.
"I can't be a regular pedestrian, I got on my grind, ain't no more stressing, Can't nobody stop me from my blessings," brushes teeth, begins day.
The pre-success but feeling success atmosphere of Drip Season 3 is both timeless and relatable, but it only makes up about half of the project.
While that half is more of a relatable atmosphere than any of his recent works, it's not enough to warrant more than half the available points in this classics category.
Replay Value Score: .16
Outshining Peers
Remember the very first sentence of this article that said, "SoundSports labeled this project a classic 18 months ago"?
Well, at the time of Drip Season 3's original crowning, it was labeled a "trap classic". This was done for two reasons. One, I was scared to name something a classic months after its release, and two, the label helped me group the project with two similar projects.
The other two were Lil Baby's Harder Than Ever and Playboi Carti's Die Lit.
At the time of their crownings, Harder Than Ever and Die Lit both ranked higher than Drip Season 3, and sadly for Gunna, that ranking is still valid today.
While Gunna oozes confidence and creates an undeniable atmosphere for the listener on Drip Season 3, Lil Baby and Playboi Carti did that and then some on their classics. In fact, Carti captured a sound so well that his fans have essentially trapped him in that sonic space forever, but that's an article for another day.
Similar to Lil Uzi's Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World, Gunna's classic project came at a time when his peers also dropped classic projects, leaving him no room to outshine or earn points in this category.
Outshining Peers Score: 0
Current Classics Leaderboard:
1.) Man on the Moon, 9.76
2.) Nothing Was The Same, 9.69
3.) PARTYNEXTDOOR 2, 9.35
4.) Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World, 9.33
5.) Drip Season 3, 9.27
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