Image via femdot./Instagram
Steven Louis is heading back to the locker room. He is questionable to return.
In which Anklejohn and Fly Anakin suit up as Riggs and Murtaugh, cruising the Capitol while pantomiming vulgarities at the Shadow Company. They’ve brought bullhorns to amplify the most important questions —“I’m tryna hit, you gon let me?” — but the flow on “Fast Eddies” is sedate and languid. Even among a cohort marked by syncopated deliveries, mutilated soul loops and out-of-pocket arcana, John is still a singular creative voice in the DC scene. He cracks jokes without needing punches or set up, and deconstructs his own fantasies with curt sleight of hand. Rhyme schemes are precise but often dragged out or delayed a half-beat against expectation. He’s an impressionist with remarkable spatial reasoning. Anakin then comes through and slightly ups the tempo, smashing hors d’oeuvres with the plug before urging his haters to get their prostate checked. They don’t make things complicated; that’s the way they get, all by themselves.
Analog architect DJ Fresh has been hosting his Tonite Show series for two decades now, and Curren$y is perhaps the marquee name most synonymous with 21st century independent rap. So how do both of these venerable underground forces sound so refreshed in 2024? The latest Tonite Show installment is familiar and reliable product from both sides, with The World’s Freshest fashioning a neon freeway for Spitta to glide across. The Rolls Royce fleet hits a choreographed three-wheel motion sequence, while the joints roll themselves up in self-actualization. Despite a hook steeped in “pay me what you owe me right now” energy, “Lay it Down” is hypnotizing. Music to waive late fees to.
Los Angeles-via-Chicago’s femdot. can read his lover’s body language through the door, a type of exhaustive and distorted intimacy that no two people would ever dare to bring into their lives. “Liquid Courage” sounds like it was sourced from ten thousand semi-regrettable nights, and recorded at the very end of one pressurized house party kickback. Memories are loosely summoned and then quickly dissolved; visages are traced without eyes meeting. This is September Chi incarnate, a radiant light sublimated into permafrost on its own accord. Fem’s BOGO tapes and 94-cent live Chicago shows, now on their fourth edition, are fully inflation-proof, sets of two-minute collages that belie their staying power.
“I’m like the most mainstream underground artist you’ve ever met,” Kamaiyah told me last year. “I’ve had a double-platinum record with Drake, a commercial with LeBron James, but I never got to build my own brand because I was stuck in a recording contract. That keeps me with a hunger that just doesn’t go away.”
The East Oakland emcee’s latest loosie is a great encapsulation of that ethos — few can sound both so luxuriously assured and righteously motivated as she does here. Popping out in a viridian JetLife tracksuit, cracking the 40 oz. outside the corner store, mugging for the fisheye lens from the neighborhood basketball court — Kamaiyah’s work is marked by an adoration for independent rap aesthetics. Her flow bellows with mettle, and she elicits full-throated call-and-response chants like an English Premier League club, but her best music is cut with a sense of unfinishedness.
San Antonio fireballer Rich Greedy raps as if he’s trapped on a treadmill, the speed and resistance steadily increasing until he creates the requisite kinetic energy to detonate. As Greedy sees it, it’s “Bout Time” for a lot of things, but they’re all slight variants of the same thing — paying this man the money he deserves. Double-cupping and donning all white, Rich Greedy builds snarling momentum rapping from the parking lot alley to the Venetian-style mansion. It’s a quick and infernal sprint — the only natural break coming for the listener’s laugh after hearing a most fantastic pronunciation of “igloo.”
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