Raw Rap - Waka Flocka Flame and Chief Keef - NYTimes.com Kevin Winter/Getty Images Waka Flocka Flame THREE years ago Waka Flocka Flame arrived loudly with "O Let's Do It," a bumpy burst of rowdy boasts and gunfire onomatopoeia. It was a rough and tumble song in a time when that style was beginning to seem extinct. Not surprisingly, when he recorded it, the goal wasn't to fit in to the hip-hop of the day. "When I made "O Let's Do It," I ain't have no intentions on being no rapper," he recently told the Web site Life + Times. Instead, it was born of a street hustle gone wrong, and the resultant frustration came through. Waka Flocka Flame was rapping, but really he was rambling, just talking his way through a difficult situation, in an extremely casual relationship to the beat behind him. It turned out, though, that Waka Flocka Flame had a lot more energy to burn: his unpolished approach became a trademark, and his 2010 debut album, "Flockaveli" (Asylum/Warner Brothers), recorded largely with the producer Lex Luger, was like an audio document of a street fight; though it was on a major label, it had the feel of a bedroom studio project, hungry in all the right ways. As rap stars go he seemed untameable, a one of one, an outlier in an era of the neatly polished. The idea that he might spawn imitators or inheritors seemed implausible. How could someone so averse to style be a creative role model? But Waka Flocka Flame's frenzy has its adherents, and it's starting to have a wider impact, even as it has remained unclear whether he himself would be allowed to stay so unchained. Undeniably Waka Flocka Flame was a star, even if he wasn't quite a rapper, and stardom has its dictates. Theoretically those should exact a toll on his follow-up album, "Triple F Life: Friends, Fans & Family" (Warner Brothers), which is to be released on Tuesday. That certainly seemed to be the case with the album's first single, "Round of Applause," which features the sensitive, caressing genre hybridizer Drake. By the standards of Waka Flocka Flame - an anti-Drake if ever there were one - it's almost a love song, albeit one about strippers, natch. His voice, usually choppy and dark, is smoothed out. He sounds like someone who raps for a living, not someone who scares rappers for a living. The more embraceable Waka Flocka Flame isn't around for long, though, on this album, which isn't quite as striking as his debut but which preserves much of its appealing mayhem. Early on, there's a song featuring the oily R&B singer Trey Songz, "I Don't Really Care." But rather than access his tenderness, Waka Flocka Flame makes his position clear from the outset, rapping, "Waka Flockaaaaaaa!/I keep them bad bitches yelling it," in an astonishingly gravelly voice full of aggression, but no malice. So goes most of this album, which is filled with festive song titles: "Let Dem Guns Blam," "Fist Pump," "Rooster in My Rari." Waka Flocka Flame's aesthetic - abetted here mostly by the producer Southside - is emphatically single-minded, as committed to form as, say, an old New York hardcore band or an arena-size Christian rock band or a 1990s progressive house producer. Like those sorts of acts Waka Flocka Flame extracts a tremendous amount of mileage out of rearranging extremely similar component parts. The exceedingly shouty "Rooster in My Rari," produced by DJ Spinz, is one of the highlights, a tense blast of anarchic come-ons. "Lurkin," a collaboration with the mealy-mouthed menace Plies, is alarmingly dark, as is "U Ain't Bout That Life," a winning collaboration with the Houston veteran Slim Thug and the intense Atlanta upstart Alley Boy. There are a handful of moments when Waka Flocka Flame abandons the bellicose barking, songs that feel as if they were guided by someone with an interest in removing him from his comfort zone in service of wider palatability. That's the case slightly on "Fist Pump," which has a gratuitous rock guitar bridge - it features and is produced in part by the Atlanta rap polyglot B.o.B. But the most blatant attempt at tempering Waka Flocka Flame is "Get Low," which sounds like a shimmering soundtrack for ecstasy-driven dancefloors. To his credit Waka Flocka Flame is still shouting here, just about warmer things: "Hair long and her eyes light/her smile shine like the sunlight/one of a kind, babymama type."