Image via Jim Legxacy/Instagram
Harley Geffner says The Bermuda Triangle really fell off.
Yesterday, I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in quite some time. As I prepared to dap him up, he yelled “I’m from the deuce, the fo, the bix, the eight, the nine,” as both a greeting and celebration. Once lyrics start dropping into the daily lexicon like this, you know we’re talking about a hit. “Gang Gang” is quickly becoming a new heavyweight Los Angeles anthem – one of the first big ones since the legendary ASM Da Bopster summer. It’s just flipping into spring time, but I would put money on this being one of the songs of the summer this year in LA, where these sorts of anthemic bops tend to stay around longer than in other metropolitan areas.
It’s just so perfectly LA, and specifically Compton. The beat feels like you’re getting stomped out with every bass hit, there’s what feels like 100 rappers on it (though only actually five), and each shout out gets more geo-targeted than the last. With an iconic opening line that is a guaranteed IG caption banger, Chef Boy yells out, “And I be slidin’ down Rosecrans… with my close friends!” Every rapper brings their absolute best stuff here, twisting their rhyme schemes like fingers in impossible directions while excited ad libs echo behind them. The hook is iconic, singable, and it’s already going up with a very Cali dance trend. The snippets from the video have been sick, and this song is ready to pop when that drops.
The beat for “On The Wall” sounds like a mixture of getting coronated in blood diamond-dripping regalia and riding around with heavy window tints serving dope across state lines. It’s Detroit as hell in that it feels smooth and almost ghostly, but those horns that kick in about 40 seconds into the song bump up the energy a notch. And Detroit rappers Lelo and Babyface Ray are a lethal combo here. Lelo pronounces “garments,” like “Gar-Mohnts” to rhyme it with Commes Des Garcons, while also accusing the universal “you,” of not being able to pronounce the brands he’s wearing. He follows it up with a barrage of mispronunciations that were so smooth it had me debating whether they really should be pronounced like that. Arson is now “our-sohn,” as far as I’m concerned.
But aside from just slick pronunciations, Lelo also has legit fire in the tank. He’s wearing combat boots, not for combat, but because they call him sergeant. He jumps in to the song by Babyface pushing the camera to frame Lelo up as he unloads: “Name a n**** fly as me, I don’t feel grounded at all / broke ass n**** tryna get like me, he ain’t nothing but a fly on the wall.”
The beat stops short when Ray enters the scene, dramatizing the entrance as he raps “who got dope in there, that’s me / who that squattin’ outside, that’s me,” like it should have been assumed it was him with the dope who was squatting outside. It’s bar after bar from there on out, with more knockout punches than should be allowed on a single song. He claims that people might mistake him for having written the ten commandments because his ability to split the seals on his prescription drug bottles is akin to the splitting of the Red Sea. The instincts on both of these guys is otherworldly, knowing exactly when to pause, when to throw in the little “huh”s along with the lulls and jumps in the beat.
The internet has decided that Samara Cyn is the next big thing, and there’s really no stopping that momentum. Tweets like these from engagement-farming accounts like “gothamhiphop” that treat rap like sports betting piss me off, but he’s right that she’s got some it-factor and has racked up a bunch of really powerful co-signs.
Samara’s music feels like it’s from everywhere, and that’s because it sort of is. In an interview with Andre Gee, she spoke about growing up in a military family and bouncing around between Tennessee, Hawaii, Colorado, California, and more, and the journey of identity and self-discovery that came with that. It stood out that she described the making of music as “freeing,” because her sound is very free-flowing and her voice is both jazzy and muddy. Her flows aren’t super original, but they move like water and feel like someone who’s confident in their own skin. It’s Doja Cat meets 070 Shake, with a little extra rap swagger.
On “Small Talk,” Oakland rapper/producer Ovrkast sets a melancholy tone with the beat, but their raps are anything but. Neither of them say much of anything honestly, but it all sounds cool and connects smoothly. Samara brings in a Biggie reference and mellows it out for a sweet hook and then later throws in a “yah trick yah” Soulja Boy reference. Samara is cool, her sound is sweet here, and this is a nice rainy day song.
Huntsville, Alabama rapper YhapoJJ is part of the nu-jerk school of rap explained recently by POW correspondent Anthony Seaman. Most of this feels like n-th wave blown out Soundcloud rap, drawing more from the spacier sound of those forebears rather than anything from the actual jerk scene, but that’s a point for another day. Most of this is bad to my ears, but there’s an occasional song that does manage to recapture the spirit of what made this spacey sound so special in the first place.
“Kamehamha” does just that, and it’s real work is in the melodies and the layering of the vocals. His voice, and the melodies that anchor it, are lacking form and texture – they’re more like an amorphous blob that might be one of those old school iTunes music visualizers. The trick here is that they’re still contained by some of the laws of physics, whereas many of the nu-jerk guys are either way too contained, and they have no regard for them at all. Yhapojj manages to strike the right balance here.
The beat is bubble gum, but it’s not trying to do too much, and leaves room for his melodies to take the spotlight. When he croons that he gave a girl all of him, it sounds like he’s a silly little angel descending from the heavens to deliver it. Once he starts echoing the layers around 1:40, his singing runs really take off, and it actually delivers on the promise of what the kids have been trying to build with this new wave. Whether they can take that formless and textureless sound, and strike a balance consistently is still up for debate.
One of the most fun music video treatments I’ve seen in quite some time. Matches a really gorgeous song, with a beautifully chopped hook that’s apparently sung by Jim Legxacy’s co-producer on the song, Joe Stanley. Jim is on a generational run right now, and no one, from the UK or anywhere else sounds anything like him. It’s what 4Batz wishes he could do.
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