Album Cover via Rio Da Yung Og/Instagram
Miguelito is a senior reporter at Stone Turntable.
The first thing Rio Da Yung Og did when he was free was take photos with a pair of airport workers. Well, maybe it wasn’t the first thing but as 2M Digital’s “Rio Da Yung Og is FREE (First Day Out Vlog)” shows, when Rio got off the jet in Atlanta, before he could have a proper reunion with his welcome party, he gave the two workers a chance to celebrate his release.
The remaining hour of the vlog condenses Rio’s first twenty-four hours after serving a 44-month sentence. He visits Jewelry Unlimited, a hub for precious accessories, has a touching reunion with his children, and records his album RIO FREE in a room overlooking the indoor pool of a palatial AirBnb. Like the single that announced its release, RIO FREE is focused, urgent, and pensive shit-talking from the standard bearer of Flint rap.
Despite the physical and spiritual limitations of federal incarceration, the project is saturated with impressions and sketches that feel as if they forced their way out of Rio’s mind. Any flatness that plagued sections of his catalogue—natural considering the volume of music he’s dropped since 2018—is absent. Hellcat sales have been dropping the past few years and Rio doesn’t need the data to tell us he doesn’t want a Charger anymore. His lyrical threads are bulkier, like the BRABUS trucks and RAM TRXs he prefers to shout out now, and he’s comfortable mining a vein for longer. On “Rap War”, the album’s final track, Rio says he runs from the “cherry boys” and follows that up with “hit a right, then a left, there we never was.” A few years back he would’ve bragged about fleeing those same agents, but left out the logistics of the escape.
In the music recorded prior to his incarceration, Rio was bottling thoughts before they could float away. On RIO FREE, he doesn’t mind ruminating a little bit longer and letting ideas (or jokes) settle. If you’re expecting a Pynchon-level backstory for Rio’s characters or for him to stretch a bit out the same way Monet would unfold light across a canvas, you haven’t met the music on its own terms. He will tell you about Bud, his “fat cousin”, though. And the fact that “Bud” is “funnier than a bitch” and would slap someone for Rio “way before [he] even had money.” It’s not a biography but it gets to the point of who “Bud” is.
Since Rio prefers to operate with a shotgun instead of a scalpel, the portions of his music that stick with you say more about you than the music itself. That’s what’s fun about scanning his reception, whether casual or critical. Do you like hearing about the difference in thickness between the 10mm and the .45 ACP? Are luxury car trims more than just an arrangement of letters? To which substances are you attuned with the precision of a sommelier?
Failing to let an idea breathe wasn’t something unique to Rio Da Yung Og. It’s a facet of the form he’s mastered. Punching in as a method—recording lines of a track individually or in short bursts—gives rappers a different set of liberties and constraints than recording a pre-written verse. One constraint is that it’s easy to keep resetting the topic even if you have the chops to follow a thread. That being said, his bars on RIO FREE feel more attentive and filled with expression, even if just from minor changes in delivery. He’ll extend vowel sounds or syllables within words and is interested in exploring the possibilities of an instrumental. Rio will move around like “a caaab serrviice” on “Uncle Sam” or use a diminutive tone in the middle of “Shake Back” to emphasize his “little small deal” with Empire. It’s subtle but there’s a new emotional depth he can mobilize.
Rio’s music was never just about shock value or drawing a cheap reaction, but it’s impossible to caricature RIO FREE as that with its expanded palette. When he says “I hope I don’t go to hell for aborting children” or that he burned down the location where his brother died “now ain’t nobody selling dope out it”, he sounds genuine and troubled. “One day I did some bullshit I know my karma coming,” from the title track is one of the themes he’s trying to reckon with on the album. Then he’ll follow that reflection with three lines about why he’s still better than his snitch cousin (not “Bud” of course), a hilarious point of continuity in Rio’s development.
While it’s hard to get a complete picture, what limited footage we have shows differences between Rio Da Young Og’s recording style and habits before and after prison. This video, taken from Rio’s Instagram Live during an early 2021 studio session with RMC Mike, is congested to say the least. Rio and Mike are going back and forth, spitballing bars and taking breaks between punch-ins to overcome any creative blockage. Every other comment rolling up the screen is a viewer suggesting the next line. Like the formal constraints of punching in, you have to consider the limitations of sharing your artistry this way. That recording session was filmed for Instagram. It was meant to be seen by fans as it was happening and, on some level, to endear them to the rappers. That helps grow a fanbase, sure, but the parasocial aspect of the medium will bleed into the result. Rio clearly felt the weight of expectations with RIO FREE—it comes through in his intensity—but they didn’t lead to recycled territory and weren’t mediated by (the same) technologies that engender their own type of behavior.
In the “First Day Out Vlog”, and presumably for the creation of RIO FREE, Rio doesn’t have to perform for the camera in the same manner. There are moments in the vlog where he does perform—he steps off a private jet with a gold plaque for God’s sake—but the footage of him recording music is something that’s captured, not streamed. The same conceits aren’t involved. Rio is zeroed in on the task, making his first song in nearly four years, unaware or unconcerned with anything except the beat, the verse written on his phone and a black and mild that’s slowly disappearing (never slow enough).
The booth isn’t stuffy, he’s recording in a chair next to the desk, and he’s fully in sync with the engineer, Wayne616, who produced a sizable chunk of the beats for RIO FREE. Compare the fluidity of their working relationship to the Instagram Live session. When recording with Wayne, all Rio has to do is say “c’mon” and the track is pulled back to the exact position he needs to punch in. At about three minutes into the Instagram Live, RMC Mike jokingly raps to the engineer “run that shit back, you ain’t punch it right.”
The relationship between form and style is delicate and not a mechanical certainty. If Rio was beginning to plateau, he rediscovered how to seek the valleys and precipices again, whether that’s because RIO FREE was an insular recording environment or something less tangible. Maybe he’s just hungry, but dips in music quality post-incarceration are common and partly why theories circulate about certain rappers being cloned in prison.
There’s no reason to be paranoid about Rio. His music before 2021 sounds historical now and not because a certain amount of time has passed, but because qualitatively he’s producing something new. If he continues burrowing into the tenacity that defines RIO FREE, we can start throwing around temporal prefixes when discussing his catalogue. One of the reasons Rio Da Yung Og is great is because he’s a slick talking vortex that expresses twenty-first century American contradictions in a way that’s digestible. His music is ugly and polished, vapid and profound, fleeting and, if we treat it properly, enduring.
Thirty minutes of the “First Day Out Vlog” is just Rio and his entourage shopping for chains, pendants and bracelets. If you’re not wealthy or don’t appreciate accessories, it’s quite boring. As they’re about to leave the store, Rio comments on a friend’s Rolex Presidential and calls it a “Joe Biden”. He realizes his mistake and corrects himself by calling it a “Donald Trump”. “I missed Joe Biden’s whole election,” he continues, “When I left Trump was president, I came back, Trump’s still president.” His prison sentence found him squished between the terms of an architect of the carceral state and the embodiment of the United State’s holiest activity, land speculation. He’s ineligible to vote for anyone or anything though and will be under some form of official state surveillance for the near future. Even his offhand comments have the power to smack you with bitter truths while you try to hold back the laughter.
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