T.I. plea-bargained his federal gun charges down to a single year of prison time, with 1,000 hours of community service “telling kids about the pitfalls of crime, drugs and gangs.” Paper Trail must be the first hour, given how most of it consists of the Atlanta rapper artlessly apologizing for and/or justifying his crimes (“Ready For Whatever,” “Dead And Gone”) and, now that he can’t talk about crime, boring us to death with humourless boasts about his wealth and sex-ploits. Once part of Southern MC royalty, the flaccid bling-flashing of T.I. vs. T.I.P.’s worse half apparently won out, since most of Paper Trail is so banal, it resembles a latter-day Ludacris album (and guess who drops by with the yawnsome “On Top Of The World”?). The fact that Tip’s only got a year before he’ll have to serve his sentence probably led to Paper Trail being rushed to market, and while pushing the trap music that got him here is no longer an option, maybe he should have opted to serve his term first so he had time to figure out how to make his new direction more appealing. Forcing Rihanna to sing the Numa Numa song (Just Blaze’s yeccch-some “Live Your Life”) should never have even been on the table.