Gangsta and lover: Fabolous is one or the other

Fabolous

For a second, all the pre-album minidramas might have made you forget about the real Fabolous.

There was the name change. F-A... B-O... L-O... U-S wasn't doing it anymore, so he started stamping his verses with ``Loso.''

There was the whole Sebastian Telfair incident, in which members of Fab's posse were videotaped snatching a neck chain from the Boston Celtics player. Fab got a bullet in his leg later that night; Telfair has denied involvement.

All that brought back memories of this Brooklyn rapper with a vicious freestyle and dope mixtapes who hit the streets and the radio hard with his debut album, Ghetto Fabolous.

But if you quickly scan the track list for Fab's fourth album, From Nothin' to Somethin', you'll see a bunch of features that look like he picked them from the R&B tree -- Ne-Yo, T-Pain, Rihanna, Lloyd, and Lil' Mo -- and remember that after his first CD he became the post-LL, pre-Cassidy chick-record rapper.

There are a bunch of them on this album. Rihanna sounds like Beyonce on First Time. Fab weaves around Ne-Yo's high hums and Timbaland's bass thumps on Make Me Better (it's a ``swagger track,'' Fab claims, not a chick record). He reunites with Lil' Mo (was Superwoman really seven years ago?) on What Should I Do.

But the highlight of the soft cuts is a collaboration with Lloyd on Real Playa Like, a breezy beat put together by Polow Da Don with a very retro-Neptunes sound.

That said, with Fab, there's no real median between his lover and his gangsta. He's one or the other.

On the rest of the album he's repping Brooklyn with Jay-Z and Uncle Murda, switching vocations (boss man, weatherman, ice man, dope man) on I'm the Man, talking dope boy to dope boy with Pusha T of the Clipse on Jokes on You, and flashing rap's requisite ``shoot you in the chest, I'll wet you'' flow.

Missing from the album version of Diamonds is Lil' Wayne's mixtape cameo. In its place is a verse from Young Jeezy, which is unfortunate.

The album is stuffed to the max with features (13 cameos on 14 tracks not including the intro). Eminem has called this cheating. But because Fab has such a strong flow and you rarely get enough of it on his albums, you always end up feeling cheated.