Dr. Dre’s The Chronic being listed as one of the best Bay Area rap albums is why Alan Chazaro doesn’t trust anything generated by AI.
It’s been eight months since Kendrick Lamar dropped “Not Like Us” and mollywhopped Drake so senselessly that he filed a lawsuit for defamation and harassment against Universal Music Group. Balance and justice had seemingly been restored in the rap multiverse once and for all. Or so we believed.
Enter Joey Bada$$, the ex-rap prodigy-turned-adequate thespian who has risen from his slumber to attempt to put the East Coast on his back. Years removed from his career apex, the now 30-year-old Brooklynite returned to take shots at J.Cole in his new Conductor Williams-produced single, “The Ruler’s Back.” It marks only the fourth song in almost as many years for Bada$$, whose last album, 2000 served as a lackluster sequel to his endearing era-defining debut, 1999.
“The Ruler’s Back” doesn’t deliver on its overt promise. His efforts to establish himself as a contemporary titan fall short. Instead, he comes off as a slighted emcee attempting to redirect the spotlight in a way that feels flat and mistimed.
Bada$$ followed up that surprise diss with another jab in “Sorry Not Sorry.” Joey continued on his Flatbush warpath, declaring “They fucked around, woke up the star” and “I want all the smoke, yeah, put my credit on the line.” Most notably, he sneered that there is “Too much West Coast dick lickin’,” which internet sleuths assume to be a sneak diss aimed at Kendrick.
As much as I have enjoyed Joey Bada$$ in my past, his latest tracks feel spiritually hollow, a recycled attempt to regain industry clout, rather than scorching the earth on his own creative terms. And yet, though his latest attempts may not have hit the mark, I also can’t help but reflect on the fact that Bada$$ is, to a certain degree, right. Joey Bada$$ has been left out of the conversation and overlooked for his generational contributions to hip-hop.
At his height, Joey popularized ’90s-minded rap better than anyone in his age group. And though his early output can be discredited as overly nostalgic and revivalist, Bada$$’s warm and charismatic flow embodied the pluralistic optimism of a Black teenager climbing the ladder of internet popularity with his golden-era remixes during Obama’s first administration. There’s a certain beauty in what that all sounded like and it simply can’t be replicated in 2025.
When he first gained national popularity among rap aficionados in 2012, Joey Bada$$ was a high school student at Edward R. Murrow High School. Over a dozen years later, it’s hard to define what it felt like listening to Joey Bada$$ when he released his canonical debut tape. The music was nostalgic, yes, but also seemed to predict an illimitable future. He arrived somehow timeless.
Let’s go back even further. I first heard E-40’s “Sprinkle Me” on KMEL via an older kid’s boombox in my apartment complex — hearing Joey Bada$$ brought back a similar feeling. At that moment, I believed that he was fated to be the genre’s savior, a flashing destroyer of worlds. Perhaps it was his age or perhaps it merely dovetailed with the moment before Obama’s “Hope” campaign lost its propagandistic sheen (or perhaps it was both). But for a second there in in 2012, Joey Bada$$ seemed like he could become the fucking greatest to ever do it. It felt good to believe in him.
The one-time 17-year-old harbinger of Soundcloud’s aPROcalypse captained Pro Era, a sterling crew of adolescent spitters who recalibrated lyrical physics with sharp wit and seemed poised to snatch the crown. They boasted the lost genius of Capital Steez (one of the great young rappers of his time who has gone largely forgotten due to his early suicide) Kirk Knight and Chuck Strangers (two of the more effortlessly enjoyable producers/emcees in the collective), and even had significant contributions from Nyck Caution (the group’s whiteboy) and Dirty Sanchez (the group’s Latino). But no one had more “aura” than their figurehead, Joey Bada$$.
At the time, I was living in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s not the greatest barometer for hip-hop’s real-world actualization by any measure, but for a West Coast kid from the Bay Area like myself, Boston embodied a certain East Coast grit — the Tims, the bodegas, the blizzardly snowfall — that I’d never intimately known up until then. Before that, all I’d ever visualized about life along the northern Atlantic seaboard originated in rap songs delivered by cerebral lyricists who constantly declared their supremacy from the depths of New York’s basements, Philadelphia’s streets and occasionally, Boston’s forgotten neighborhoods. Rap music, in that sense, has always been the most hyper-regional genre in which accessing a place — and time — through noise becomes possible.
When I think back on those four coldest years of my life, the rise of Joey Bada$$ defined my sonic identity as a temporary Beast Coaster. In 2012, I was a Vans-wearing California kid in my 20s still figuring out how to adapt to New England while downloading DatPiff mixtapes from a young Kendrick Lamar (who had just changed his name from K.Dot); I was bumping brand new Heartbreak Gang compact discs (which I bought at Best Buy) in my stick-shift Ford; I was tracing the rise of underground Southern rappers of the day like Curren$y and Big K.R.I.T. A few years prior, I’d consumed J. Cole’s earliest mixtapes (Friday Night Lights still ranks among the most-played projects of that era) and his earliest studio music (not very good).
Then, a purple-hazed A$AP Rocky came along and initiated a well-fashioned renaissance of coolness. His Houston-dripped whimsy and Memphis-textured references marked the onset of the “New” New York. From there, the floodgates opened. East Coast rap had returned as a hybridized fusion of styles and eras as variegated as those mismatching plaid shirts from places like Urban Outfitters that started to gain popularity around the same time. A$AP Mob, Action Bronson, Flatbush Zombies, The Underachievers, Ratking. They all held weight individually. But as a loosely unified front, they bullied their way back into the national rap discourse, which had also begun to manifest via new forms of social media and peak internet blogdom.
Rap in those years transmitted the feeling of something new for my age group. It rattled with excitement and the unknown. After the G-funk and boom-bap glory of my elder millennial upbringing had largely faded, a new generation of voices had spawned with sound cannons of their own. And the potential, if not certain promise, for what rap could offer seemed as nascent and propitious as it ever has in my elderly lifetime.
For the remaining years that I lived in Boston, Joey’s music — 1999, Rejex, Summer Knights, and, to a much lesser degree, B4.DA.$$ — shaped my relationship with not just rap, but with the East Coast as a physical space. I took road trips to peripheral towns like Merrimack, New Hampshire (where Anheuser-Busch gave free tasting tours of their Budweiser brewery) during a literal snowstorm while blasting “Fromdatomb$.”
I embarked upon all of New England’s famously autumnal quests, all the while listening to “Alowha” and “Sweet Dreams.” I hit up Queens, Philly, D.C. and Baltimore. I went as far west as Toronto and Montreal, and north up to Buffalo. I spent summers (and winters) in Vermont and Maine. I won’t lie to you, good reader, I even owned a Boston Red Sox fitted cap after spending nearly half a decade working as a public high school teacher in Boston, a literal head nod to my commitment on the fringes of the East, which had by then thoroughly reestablished itself as a heavyweight in the hustle-and-flow rap game, in large part thanks to the crop of artists I am now tributing.
I eventually returned to my Bay Area roots, and throughout the decade, picked up on new music, learned about different shit, reverted back to my Oakland A’s wardrobe (don’t trip, I still repped the A’s in Boston, too) and sorta forgot about Joey Bada$$. Like many of the best in any art form, his career’s luster began to diminish, falling further from the apex of stardom that I once anointed as his grand rap destiny. As he grew older, he released singles here and there, but ended as a biteless version of the venomous rapper he once proved himself to be as a passionate teen. And that’s okay.
In January of 2025, I’ve woken up to find Joey Bada$$ circulating the internet anew. Online discourse about his re-emergence has taken over my algorithm for the past week.
There’s a strange sense of aging that happens in one’s bones and mind when seeing a once-young public figure who has fully matured. It’s almost as if a completely new and different artist has consumed the one we once knew. And the landscape, too, had shifted since the teenage cyphers that defined Joey’s rise. Roc Marciano and Ka and their offshoots have overtaken the lane that Joey once clearly navigated on his way to recognition. billy woods and Backwoodz Studioz have lifted NYC up as an underground recording matrix unto itself, while Buffalo’s Griselda has also since emerged as a fierce, East Coast-flag bearing frontrunner.
Where does Joey fit in today? Did others figure out how to do more than pastiche and leave him in the dust while he acted? There has certainly been a lot of shit talking and downplaying about him lately. But it’s all revisionist, in my book. Though his beef-stirring joints in the year of our lord ’25 aren’t the bangers he wants us to believe they are, Bada$$ deserves to be remembered as an artist who provided us with greatness in a moment of time, even if he never reached the same level of mainstream success as some of his peers.
Joey Bada$$ will never recreate the magic of the early 2010s. Obama will never re-enter the Oval Office. The clock can’t turn back to 1999. But we shouldn’t let the internet completely dictate legacies, either. Let it be known that there was, in fact, a time when Joey Bada$$ and his posse of 11th-grade wunderkinds (#longlivesteelo) were pound-for-pound some of the best to do it.
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