Screenshot via Jap5 – “Unlocked”/YouTube
Harley Geffner still wants to know if Project T-Pain is 03 Greedo’s best album?
The Hoovers were poised to erupt as the biggest neighborhood for rap in LA before budding local superstars Jap5 and Tr3yway6k got locked up on unrelated charges over the last three years. Tr3y still has another four years left, but Jap was released just last week and immediately took to the booth to kick off a new hot streak. “Unlocked” is one of his best songs yet, tapping into that raging, knuckled-up energy and harnessing it in a more controlled way than anything in his previous discography.
Jap rips through a brilliantly Cali-fried sample of Akon’s “Locked Up,” with a nasty snarl – taunting and flexing his way across the beat with slippery flows and unexpected swerves. There’s a Pikachu sound-effect ad-lib, a jab at the people who counted him out but “can’t even count,” and a chopper that plays ring-around-the-rosy. It’s classic LA street rap, but sharper and more focused than before.
Jap looks even more like a bodybuilder than when he went in, and he sounds like someone who understands exactly how rare this window is. “Unlocked” feels like a warning shot: he’s back, he’s dialed in, and he’s not wasting a single second.
There was a time when folks were calling SOB x RBE the West Coast Migos. They were a bunch of teenagers from the venerated-in-rap-lore Vallejo area, and they got hot out of seemingly nowhere. They lit the entire coast on fire and then songs like “ANTI” blew them out of just the West Coast ecosystem. Kendrick brought them in to record a show-stopping feature on the Black Panther album, one of the founding members Lul G got a 21-year sentence, and then things turned sour as Yhung TO signed a solo deal and stopped appearing in many of the group’s videos. This is an abbreviated and non-exhaustive history, but the point here is that the group split up, leaving them as one of the biggest what-ifs of the last decade.
DaBoii continued dropping aggressive solo tapes and singles for years, Yhung TO went more R&B, and Slimmy B receded into comparive obscurity despite continuing to drop. There was always some tension between the SOB and the RBE sides and I’m not sure anything will bridge that gap, but it’s nice to see at least the SOB partners, DaBoii and Slimmy B, reunited and making good rap again.
The reunion beat is a loaded one. Its lineage runs from a 2004 Silkk the Shocker, Master P, and Petey Pablo record (I know you hear those “Freek-A-Leek” style synths), to “3rd World Fee Broski” by Lil Blood and Lil Goofy, a song that became a Bay Area rite of passage. If you were in school anywhere in the Northern California area around 2017, there’s a 100% chance you had strong feelings about this song, one way or another. So it only made sense to use this beat (really more of a cultural shorthand than anything else) for the long-awaited return of two of the original SOB guys on the same track.
“Crestside” looks and sounds exactly like you want it to. Women twerking in and around a neighborhood liquor store, DaBoii and Slimmy B trading bars about women, guns, and the difference between real and fake diamonds, and all the girls chanting the “Northside, Crestside” hook while the guys hit smooth little dances in between. It’s not revolutionary, but it doesn’t need to be.
“Crestside” is good, familiar rap music made by two artists who still sound like themselves. The kind that reminds you why people cared in the first place. For longtime fans, it scratches a very specific itch. And after years of false starts and what-ifs, that alone feels like a win.
After 15 years, Chief Keef is still switching flows like it’s nothing. By my count, he runs through six distinct pockets on “Talking Ish,” each one landing clean and in rhythm with the beat’s movement. Nothing feels forced or overworked. My favorite comes around the 1:03 mark, when he clicks into sport mode and starts rapping about riding his Maybach like it’s a broom.
Sosa can still reach back and throw the fastball when he wants to. Between this and recent release “Harry Potter,” it feels like a reminder that this isn’t an occasional burst of brilliance, but something he can summon on demand. Call him a postseason ace, just don’t ask him to grind the regular season. At this point, every Keef appearance like this feels like a small blessing: he looks healthier than ever, sounds like he’s genuinely having fun, and toys with the beat, the ad-libs, and his own skill set like someone fully at ease with who and where they are in life.
Given how much tragedy has surrounded Chicago drill over the past decade and a half, moments like this deserve to be appreciated. Not every story gets to age this gracefully.
Kodak Black is an objectively horrible person, but also one of the most compelling villains rap has ever produced. From a purely musical standpoint, he remains one of the most gifted rappers alive, even as he’s been effectively blackballed from mainstream coverage for very real and very deserved reasons. Kodak exists outside the usual systems of rehabilitation and rebranding. He’s a true outlaw. And what makes any villain interesting is contradiction. Kodak has always been unnervingly good at interrogating himself, letting you hear the gears grind in real time on his best records.
On “God’s Plan,” that inner conflict is front and center. The song isn’t a redemption arc or a plea for absolution. It’s closer to a prayer muttered under duress. Kodak keeps circling faith, fate, violence, and self-awareness without resolving any of it, bouncing between belief and doubt, gratitude and paranoia. He talks about walking through death “like I’m immortal,” admits he doesn’t know if God really has a plan for him, and then immediately falls back into the habits and instincts that got him here in the first place. This tension is more natural than intentional for him.
What makes much of his best music – including this song – work is that Kodak never pretends to be healed or enlightened. He sounds exhausted, confused, and deeply aware that time keeps giving him chances he may not deserve. The hook plays like a mantra he’s trying to convince himself of. It’s uncomfortable, messy, and at times ugly, which is exactly why it’s so compelling. Kodak has always been at his best when he’s honest about the chaos in his head, even when that honesty doesn’t lead anywhere neat.
The artist name and song title tell you almost everything you need to know about HappyDranker’s approach. He raps like punctuation doesn’t exist, words collapsing into each other until the whole verse feels like one continuous motion. The Philly phenom has one of the most distinctive flows in the current crop of young rappers, blending into the beat like he’s shimmering through it at a molecular level. He bends rhythm and breath in an oddly hypnotic way.
He never takes the mask off, literally or figuratively, but the anonymity only adds to the intrigue. If HappyDranker can keep churning out records like this, the mystery might end up being the least interesting thing about him.
Credit to the French underground for consistently producing rap both weirder and more intriguing than almost anything going on over here at the moment. I wasn’t sure whether this was the coolest or the worst thing I’d ever heard on first listen (credit BillDifferen), but almost every new wave of rap starts out that way. It has me asking whether this is what all new rap is going to sound like in 10 years, and if we’re at the base level of something that has many more layers to open around it.
San Diego’s SieteGang Yabbie might be the funniest rapper working right now, not just in bars but in pure physical comedy. He moves like a silent-film actor dropped into a rap video, and the music is sharp enough to keep up with the antics. On this track, he plays a man on the run from a bounty hunter, squeezing laughs out of every detail: struggling to get his backpack on, failing to fit through doorways, stopping for dance breaks, and running with what can only be described as an absurd, turbocharged high-step. If you saw someone legitimately running like that in person, you’d start cracking up on sight.
He also doubles up and plays the role of the bounty hunter, wearing a white body suit and a farmer’s hat, eventually catching up with himself and then negotiating a release based on an offer of “batches,” (you can guess what that translates to). Yabbie has his own lexicon, and listening to his music feels like slowly unlocking a new world, similar to the hieroglyphic deciphering we once had to do with Drakeo. On “Shhh (Don’t Tell Nobody),” the only discernible word rapped is “YOP,” and everything else is secondary to the joke, the motion, and the world he’s building.
We’re running a little long on the rap up here, but we can’t leave without our weekly dose of Rio and Mike. Here’s a sampling of some of my favorite bars from our favorite punch in gods on this track.
“Okay I know you got your strap, but we strapped better”
“Me and the drank had fell out, but we back together”
“Louie V whitey tighties on, lookin’ like a wrestler”
“Hunting with this brand new .308, I shot a spotted leopard”
“Hit his ass from 57 yards with a car bomb”
“I sold a striker yesterday but now the car mine”
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