Image via Nino Paid/Instagram
Harley Geffner wants to know what they even do in the Met Gala.
Skrilla comes from the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Wikipedia darkly describes it as a neighborhood with low rents leading to a flourishing “brewery scene,” but anyone who has spent real time in Philly knows that it’s the drug den of the city. It’s a depressing place, where the fangs of addiction are sunk deeply into the fabric of the area. People saunter by, seemingly zapped of their self-determination aside from the focus on how to get their next fix. It’s a place that our country has failed, and walking through the area would lead any sane person to consider the opioid epidemic an emergency situation and a battle to revive the soul of our society. Meanwhile, right next door, tech bros are sipping on craft IPAs for $12 a pour.
Whether it’s just the role he plays in his music or he is actually out in the streets like this, Skrilla is the plug for the addicts in the area. His music videos heavily feature these people, and he even shows a rotting foot of one in the “Chrome Hearts” video, as he peeks his head out the window of his slum-lord run apartment. It’s incredibly sad and can be hard to watch, but to Skrilla, it’s regular. The frenetic energy of addicts and the way they, and everyone involved with the open-air drug trade, move infects Skrilla’s music.
He both speeds and slows through his words, like an addict moving from the feeling of urgency to that of relief with a fix. His thoughts violently overlap each other, and his cadences bounce off every corner of his mind as he splatters his onomatopoeic ad-libs. His flows are sometimes delicate as he tap dances through the darkness, and sometimes they feel clumsy and heavy, like someone falling off balance just before catching themselves. He calls blitzes and his boys come back with a bone, his mom is mad about all the gold in his teeth, and his rhyme schemes are complex and unpredictable, swerving into the territory of something that feels completely novel. Whether it’s too hard to watch or you can’t look away is up to you.
Atlanta’s Benji Blue Bills continues to blow me away with his flow every time I hear him rap. The first 30 seconds of 3B Psycho Diary are basically perfect, as he sets up a bar “I got bitches on every bitch up in this bitch,” and it’s somehow abundantly clear that he’s saying he has modifiers on every weapon in his house.
DJ Mustard’s new gospel-inspired album, Faith Of A Mustard Seed, is apparently bombing, and Mustard is calling Billboard numbers an extension of white supremacy on Twitter to fight back against Drake stans. There is some validity to that point, but the numbers are irrelevant to this blog. The album was really strong – soulful and pointed, but people were probably expecting bangers. Whatever.
“Ghetto,” with Thug and Durk is one of the high points, coming near the tail of the album, and injecting it with a catchiness that some of the more soulful joints were missing. Mustard takes us on a tour through iconic spots in LA, from Leimert Park and the African drum salesmen to a lowrider show and Swap Meet. He brings in the youth dance group, the Divas of Compton who nail the dances, brings in appearances from the Baby Stone Gorillas’ 5Much and upstart San Diego rapper TC4 (the one with the insane Newport chain), and takes us down to the Slauson Super Mall.
Aside from the video being a love letter to the city, it’s also just a really catchy and sweet song. Young Thug, who is currently incarcerated as he continues to be denied his right to a fair and speedy trial, stays in his high tones as he sings a sticky hook, zeroing in on being a child of the ghetto, and how that stays with you. He counts his blessings, understanding where he’s from.
He doesn’t use ghetto derogatorily, he says it fondly, to show how appreciative he is for the times that made him who he is. Plus,mingling with the violin, he just sounds so good on Mustard’s production. Interrupting the song in the middle to talk over the beat (note that even the lilt in his voice when he’s talking regularly sounds melodic), Thug expresses that when he puts people on, it’s so that they can put people on, and we can all work together towards prosperity. It’s a gorgeous song, Durk’s verse is very solid too. Let’s just ignore that little skit at the end.
Khantrast used to be a dude who rapped over lo-fi study music, made songs about his Tinder matches, and eventually graduated to anime rap. None of that is for me, but it’s all fine and clearly has some market appeal given his streaming numbers. On his newest, “Landed In Brooklyn,” he takes a stab at Brooklyn drill, and butchers it so badly that the spirit of Pop Smoke came down just to place a curse on his family.
It’s good to evolve as an artist, healthy even, but not at the price of selling out your heritage and gutting the genre you’re moving into for parts. He starts his “freestyle” walking out into a Brooklyn backyard as the only Asian guy at the cookout. He flashes a pair of chopsticks and opens with, “I’m on my villager tip.” He says he’s got a rake in place of a blick, pulls out a straw hat as he raps again about how girls want “villager dick,” and references Oolong and Rush Hour in ways that make you cringe. He raps about smoking his opps too, of course, because how could he not?
Khantrast’s aesthetics scream colonizer, as he walks in confidently wearing silver grills and a chain, and raps with a snarl of his upper lip. All of this could possibly be forgiven, or more likely just ignored, if it wasn’t also a horrible sounding song. The beat is uninspired as drill can get, and he raps like a copy of a copy of a copy of the original sound. The soul of the music is completely rotted in the way he raps, with no interesting flows or even a hint of originality. He’s making fun of his own cultural background for cheap laughs, and not even doing it well. The even more sinister part is that he’s also making fun of the people who really live the life he’s trying to borrow.
The whole endeavor is disrespectful of both himself and of the circumstances out of which Brooklyn drill was pioneered. This is a corporate conglomerate coming in to buy out a cool and diverse start-up just for the clients. This is a label offering a young Black artist a 360 deal that’ll leave them with no control over their future earnings. This is a white girl with dreads who yells Black Lives Matter, but clutches her purse when she sees a Black guy on the street. The grifting is reaching all-time levels. Him and Lil Mabu should make a song together – it’s what our dumb ass culture deserves.
The DMV’s Nino Paid is as introspective as they come. As friend of the program, Alphonse Pierre, wrote in his latest column, he was barely able to muster a single word while smoking with a friend in his sparse apartment. He said that he learned not to say much, having been in and out of jail and the foster care program his whole life.
The studio is where he can really say what he feels, where he can open up and tell the stories of the downtrodden that he knows so intimately. On “Relapse,” he recounts, over what most would not perceive as a rap beat, the story of a young man who fell in love with pills to cope with the pain. He mourns the broken promise that he once made to his mother that he wouldn’t let the world swallow him up like his father did. He isolates himself from his friends, and he searches for a message at the bottom of a bottle of pills. He looks in the mirror and stares at the rain clouds while frozen in time as life and those around him continue to pass him by.
There’s no easily perceivable emotion in his voice as he raps this dark story, but there are real traumas buried deeply beneath the matter-of-fact dissection of the addict’s psyche.
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