Image via Bag Gunna/Instagram
If you crash out, Donald Morrison says you better break the backboard.
I grew up with this meth dealer in Oregon who went by the nickname Worm. I knew him since we were 12 and I still don’t think I ever found out his real name. He’s in Oregon State Prison now. He has the word “tweaker” tattooed on his forearm. He’s easily one of the most proud meth users I ever met. We all made fun of him, but I admired him, too. I keep imagining his reaction to the work tweaker, or tweaking, gaining a new and wider cultural definition in recent months. It doesn’t just represent the act of being on methamphetamines anymore, now it can mean that you’re simply partying hard or turning up. Good for you, Worm.
Ghetto Baby Boom has released what is by far the cleverest and most innovative rap video of the year so far with “Whole Lotta Tweakin,” which looks like it was made with the help of every single person the Detroit rapper encounters on a day-to-day basis. Everyone spits a line as the rapper makes his way through his neighborhood. Each person gets their turn: a kid with a squirt gun, a half-naked hairdresser, the oddly-familiar crazy guy screaming in front of the laundromat. The video is so ingenious I think it could have been made using AI.
The song is funny and hard-hitting enough to work with the visuals. Lines like “bitch say I’m boring, fuck you want to do, go hit the club?,” are spoken with such disdain to make the statement almost laugh-out-loud funny. The Michigan-drawl of Ghetto Baby Boom gives him the perfect mix of being both excited yet annoyed, and he’s learned from Rio Da Yung OG, who’s also known to sprinkle in motivational aphorisms between rhymes about pints of lean and .223’s., like “you can live a long life, but you only die once, so if you do some shit, just make sure you do it right.”
Bag Gunna has released the working man’s anthem. A song that connected with me personally as someone who perpetually hovers at around 2,000 followers on basically all my social media accounts. The California rapper managed to strike lightning in a bottle these last few weeks with “2K,” a braggadocious hit about finally being legitimate now that he has two thousand streams on one of his songs. Babyface Ray tweeted the lyrics and now this song has nearly 200,000 views on Youtube. Proving he’s more than legit now. Watching him dancing happily to his 2,000 streams never ceases to make me smile.
Bag Gunna immediately seemed to me to be a real person, someone who isn’t cosplaying or consumed by ego. In a world enraptured by fake shit, there’s a purity to Bag Gunna that I hope never leaves, although the internet will try its best to strip him of it. The rest of his YouTube channel features some gems as well. “2K” features a “Bay Area Type Beat” complete with laser noises and blown out bass. It features Bag Gunna proclaiming he just needs “a lil 2 bands.” I have a feeling he’ll be getting a lot more than that.
You know what you’re getting before you even click into a song with these artists in 2025: a crisply-produced, bouncy song that feels like it’s leeching off the nostalgia for early 2000s Hyphy. It’s not that the song is bad: it sounds incredible, some of the best-produced music from the West Coast since GNX. But there’s a spontaneity present in the early Hyphy music just just isn’t here in some of these songs. Having said that, “Had To” is a great addition to any party playlist “from the Bay to the A,” as Keak da Sneak would say.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the last Young Nudy album, Sli’merre 2, which felt like a collection of loosies about getting fucked up that never made their way onto other Pierre Bourne projects. “That’s Not Gangsta” sounds like a reinvigorated Young Nudy who has deliberately decided to level up his sound and experiment with some different types of flows and intonations. You can feel his sincerity in lines like “downing all these drugs, though I was going to feel better.” Young Nudy knows the band aid of drug use doesn’t actually fix the underlying wound. I’m glad someone is finally saying it.
“1st Day Out” is classic Wizz. He has one of my favorite voices in rap today, confident and raspy like a more laidback Bossman Dlow. I can tell he recorded this fresh out of jail due to the bars about commissary and various county blues. I hope Wizz keeps his freedom in the months ahead. You might not have even known Wizz Havinn was in jail these past few months. His team has released a steady stream of new music and videos to satiate fans while Wizz continues fighting his legal woes, which stem from his getting caught with a glock with a switch attached during a traffic stop in 2024. The video shows Wizz greeting his friends after a stint in county jail, his afro larger than usual, his smile bigger than we’ve ever seen. It’s hard to describe that feeling of being released from jail and seeing your loved ones. It’s something you remember forever.
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