Rapsody, “God Gotta Afro” feat. Karabo yaMorena Choir

A morning spent in front of a mirror morphs into a sermon on its first verse: beads clinking “clink, clink, clink”, afro puffed, rollers like a headdress, and afro shine whipped to a slick polish. By “Cocoa butter on my brown skin like my eyes is” Rapsody is talking us through a Black woman getting herself together as if she is constructing a god. Mr Porter provided the beat, and on it the Karabo yaMorena Choir handles the simple refrain that Rapsody distributes to the room: “God gotta afro.”

She fills the hook with so much Black memory that the verses don’t drift off into affirmation. With only a bar or two apiece, she references Clipse, Diana Ross, “Poetic Justice,” “Like Water for Chocolate,” Andre 3000 as “prototype OG,” Auntie Em, burning bushes, red Kool-Aid- enough allusions to sink a less confident emcee. Rapsody for the most part keeps above the pileup but some sections read like a roll call, with references piling up faster than she can fully articulate any of them. One bar skips beyond product and hair, and into bloodline; that is the bar I return to: “Look just like my momma’s momma’s momma’s momma’s continent.” That’s the afro as inheritance, a line stretching four generations to a place. “God look like me” comes after that, sounding like it finally has the receipt. Her fifth album drops in August. —Phil

YG, “INSECURE” feat. JID & Ab-Soul

It’s nothing new to hear rappers talk about being scared, and for the most part it manifest as a confessional track amidst a suit of armor. On “INSECURE”, YG gives the same admission to three different men and each one fails to live up to it in his own unique way. He sets it up at the beginning of the song discussing how “growing up I thought silence make you solid, but it don’t,” and the song is closed by a spoken word intro to a “Gentlemen’s Club,” where men can talk about things you’d never otherwise hear them speak about (The Gentlemen’s Club is the same title as YG’s upcoming album). Issa Rae’s name is mentioned in both the title and the verses, so it’s clear from the jump what the setup is—a show about having to let the world see behind the curtain.

YG’s verse is the most suspect, and perhaps the most honest in this instance. Every time he tries to break open, he has to resort to the same level of swagger, copping to performance anxiety one minute (“Scared thinkin’ how early I might nut”), and the next threatening to tell the girl he’s speaking to to “hush.” JID takes the route of trying to twist his craft on its head, where normally he’s rapping about all the money he makes with women, here he’s rapping about how “Your bitch could tell you where my inches went” before asking himself, “Am I immature? Maybe.” Finally, Ab-Soul presents the verse that gives the song its name, rapping from the perspective of an “SJS survivor,” who mentions how at six-years-old children would laugh at him and girls “passin’ me by,” and goes on to the most sorrowful point: now that he has success and money he can get any woman he wants “Except for the woman I want, body-wise.” The chorus simply spells out what each man can’t seem to say: “I’m insecure as fuck,” the only instance on the song where the feeling isn’t dramatized through actions.

Ab-Soul gets the last verse and it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. By the time he’s mentioning a condition and a middle school flashback, the entire swagger on the initial verse is already apparent to the listener as the exact facade he is describing and it explains why one may have to pop “dick pills” before seeing a stripper. —Quinn Baptiste

Nipsey Hussle & Bino Rideaux, “Sacrifices” feat. James Fauntleroy

The battle has already begun when the song kicks off. Bino Rideaux spends the chorus on a woman who “wasn’t never gon’ change” pressing her directly on whether or not she’s for him then writes her out as “ain’t no sacrifices in you.” The first stretch falls on her entirely, and not on him. His is the plea of the man convinced he’s been the only one on this thing with something to offer and that he has taken the whole thing on the chin. Behind it all though is the “Fly as hell, all-black YSL” sung chorus, saving it from sounding like a rant.

Nipsey Hussle is the reason you are sticking around. Where Bino calls out his woman, Nipsey turns it on himself-naming what it is that he does wrong. He is responsible for “broke your heart for these Benzes,” for “Don’t fall in love with no hustler, you know that come with conditions,” for the reason he keeps circling through to the third verse of the song, the realization “love ain’t ‘posed to be prison.” He is like a business man who can’t turn off the logic, even when hurt. “Plant us in fertile soil then plan for the fruit.” The chorus is functional and it does the job. To make a song it’s good enough. It’s across the third verse that Nipsey names all the costs and the stakes and then freezes on a sentiment that he can’t intellectualize. “You ever been so conflicted you scared to make a decision?” After a man so sure of everything else he’s ever had to say, it’s a rare flash of the human being. —Randy

Rick Ross, “Mahogany Caskets” feat. T.I.

Here, you have to salute the work ethic. Some twenty-odd years in playing a kingpin who may or may not have ever moved a single brick, Rick Ross is still showing up in bulletproof trucks and popping out with the chain, forever finding a new luxury item to threaten you with. “Mahogany Caskets” is exactly the Ross you’d hope for, opening on “Stefon Diggs, I need another bitch” and unfolding an entire scheme on the NFL’s Diggs brothers which might be brilliant, or the lamest linking tissue possible, depending on the line; it sounds like he’s enjoying himself, and mostly I am too.

T.I. drops in and effortlessly out-raps the host on his own track, a feature I replayed in order to understand why I enjoyed this so much more; there’s density, aggression, and a focus that you wouldn’t expect at this point, linking the rap game with a “prenup,” talking about “trippin’ since clippin’ my umbilical,” and walking out of a robbery with a man’s teeth in his pocket “as a souvenir”-we take them new veneers home with us as a souvenir. Ross makes his case with flashes, when he drops the flexing for a quick punchline, saying he’d “let a bitch rap” before he’d ever snitch, and throwing in the obligatory “fuck 50 Cent” he seems duty-bound to include in his every outing. None of this is new, and Ross is not trying to make it new; these are just grown men making up extravagant lies on a Nef-U beat, with T.I. as the game’s top performer. —Asa McKenzie

Maxo Kream, “Time Out”

The grief, howbeit, appears from bars one to four, and it never fully departs. Loves of his life are “unalive now” and “addicted to the Adderall and violence, Amy Winehouse.” After the loss of his father, Maxo journey across the globe, to Niger, Lagos, and Ghana, in search of the stable bedrock, seeking his roots. Over a beat by JPEGMAFIA, he writes, as he always does, like a journal page, complete with all the typos, “Time Out” catching him at his lowest, at his most unadorned.

Maxo uses the largest segment of his bars to describe why he will not attend therapy, despite the desire. He notes that he needs “but never make the time” and runs into the wall every stranger becomes-the issue of handing over his own life to someone else who has no chance of carrying it—“I can’t tell a cracka what my niggas kill and die for.” Passed down as it is in the block, the pain is not something one could ever trust a notepad, and a stranger, with; hence, “Can’t share it with no therapist”. The phone rings; it is from Jordan, one of his closest loved ones serving fifty years for murder, who, from prison, advises him to “straighten up and stand on business,” and keep his head down, due to the number of people in his life who still depend on him. When he recalls his suicidal impulses from his lowest moment, he states it flatly and then continues on as one might discuss something that they’ve weathered. It is the final turn that sticks. His support is a collect call from a man doing fifty years for murder, a teardrop tattoo to represent the tears that he allowed himself to shed-to get his head up and his eyes fixed on those who need him. He lets that man talk him out of it, and then relates the experience without a hint of irony. —Kamarion

Rap Albums to Check Out

• Wiki: Ancient History

• Awon & The Other Guys: Solidified

• Hit‑Boy: HITstory 2: Success Is a Dirty Word*

• Jim Jones: The Landlord

• Mickey Diamond & Big Ghost Ltd: Blood of the Lamb

• BabyChiefDoit: Rise Against My Broken Odds

• Dee‑1: The Shift

• Freddy Stone & Q No Rap Name: REAL LIFE VOLUME 1*

• $amaad: Idea of Evil

• Don Gunna: Crack Music 3

• Terry Presume: FREE

• Woo Da Savage: Rap Scholar

• BSG Rambo: Sincerely, Beezy

• ZekeUltra & Savedbyher.: DOGS NEVER DIE

• HeadHuncho Amir: All My Intentions Real

• Big Rush: DILEMA DO OURIÇO

• Lyno Nine8: Flightmode

• lil2posh: Graduation Tape

• Dro Kenji: IT IS WHAT IT IS

• YFG Pave: Niemand

• Tezzus: THE RESURRECTIØN

• Lil Rae: The Godfather 2

• The Musalini: Summer Breeze (EP)

• Lute: Hard to Reach (EP)

• Dom Venice: Paid to Live (EP)

• Bary: Kuba vs Bary (EP)

• Danny Towers: Marina Money (EP)

• MC Serch & Apathy: Millions Of Zeros (EP)

• Shaolin Monkey, C.Terrible & 1010!: Another Battle (EP)

• Rebel Rae: Free the Girls (EP)

• Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer: Purity (Flips)

• Fly Anakin: (The) Forever Dream’s Night Shift

• DeevoDaGenius & TEGA: Da Story of Tega Brady (Deluxe)

• G Herbo: Lil Herb: Lil Heroin Edition

Other Songs to Check Out

• Ludacris: Real Hustla (feat. GloRilla)

• Polo G: Weight On My Shoulders

• Kid Ink: No Play

• Pell: Thru the Lines (feat. Kota the Friend)

• DAMEDAME*: FIRE BURNIN’ THRU THE RAIN

• BlocBoy JB: Get You Some Money (feat. HoodRich Pablo Juan)

• Raz Fresco: THE BLIND / BORDERS

• Sonnyjim & Da$h: $Cramble

• DJ Muggs, T.F & NEMS: Power Tools

• ANKHLEJOHN & SwuM: AURA FARMING

• Magic & Bird (Andy Mineo & Wordsplayed): FIRE FROM ABOVE (Maxi‑Single)

• Erick the Architect: No Doubt (I’m In Love)

• DijahSB: The Signs (feat. Kwncy)

• Tay‑K: Everywhere I Go / Erupt

• Molly Santana: Can’t Touch This

• Toosii: yesterday

• Mike D: True Colors

• Parallel Thought & Fatboi Sharif: Parallel Paradox

• AKTHESAVIOR: BLESSINGS

• Larry June: The Machinist

• Dezzy Hollow: JOOGIN’

• Jay Exodus, Big Gates & Jay Worthy: Scared Money

• Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal: Unfinished Concrete Initials (feat. Hemlock Ernst)

• Jay Cinema & Sefu: Amethyst

• Joey Purp: Merch That (feat. NEZ)

• Kaden Jordan, DJ Mykael V & TJ Carroll: IMAGE

• Kiran the Nomad: For What It’s Worth

• midwxst: DON’T TRUST

• 2slimey: lobby

• Armani West: basketball

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Before the stranger arrives, “The $triker” dedicates the first verse to what the narrator is not. Not a life as a painter—ending she already know to be grim—and definitely not one of the bragging art students at Pratt, a block away—Jourden would “prefer not to join them,” anyway. Outside Kum Kau, corner of Washington and Myrtle, the self-portrait is completed before the stranger has arrived at all.

Approaching the striker, she’s already taken on the role. “With a spunk only a jackoff could decipher,” the narrator bets her voice has the “velocity to crack open a can of worms.” At the same time, she concedes that her facade needs work—the “guise” must “disguise the fear that I was holding.” A little lie to begin the interaction: requesting a pass. “What’s the rush for hell, angel?” he asks, and the implied danger in his voice passes over in his laugh. The reason why the narrator is there begins to slip out of her mind, “Surreal like Dal, the clock it melted fast.”

In the second verse, the switch is instant. From “We got to talking, then got to walking, he got to sparking/The smoke, it hit me, I got to coughing,” we go from conversation to the first bad clue, a jump signaled by the repetition of a single rhyme. Her clue is a borrowed hook. When he “passed the dutchie, pon the left hand side,” the patois seamlessly incorporates “Pass the Dutchie” into the very moment that things begin to go sour, when the spliff “ja made me crazy na bomboclat.” Her feet give out, they “betrayed me like I stole somebody’s shoes,” and for what the narrator cannot envision on her own, she uses “Get Out,” screaming soundlessly in the sunken place.

“Ring ding dong” and “Ready for your lessons and your medicine” are instructions with concrete implications. The medicine is in the room. The narrator wakes up “connected to an intravenous drip and strapped up like a loon,” spitting out the strap with the certainty it will “take Jesus Christ to resurrect me out this tomb.” Panicked, her bargain rhymes grow tighter as her situation escalates. “I promise Jesus,” she claims, “I’ll be the bestest and the goodest girl that you ever had”—a nun, an organizer of charitable works, anyone but “the girl who got killed up in the slums.” The escape, however, lies with her. When the captor “busted through the door like The Flash,” she saw an opportunity to grab, ducks his charge, stabs him in the back, and speeds out.

The final spoken outro ties it together: “I just wanna think about the instance/Of what would actually happen, you know/If I did go and take it there that one night.” The knife and the locked room had been merely a situation she had been working through. With the abduction withdrawn, she returns to her starting point, on the corner outside Kum Kau, figuring out how bad things could have been that night.

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None of “WAX PAPER” will hit you until a second listen. First time through, it’s a brag, it’s a threat; it’s only on the rewind that you catch the second meaning, which was, right there, all along, nestled inside the same sounds. Tierra Whack writes for the rewind—a Conductor Williams beat piled high with couplets where a single word pulls double duty, the insult underneath hiding until the rhyme spits it out. If this is the type of energy we’re getting on WHACK’S MUSEUM (releasing on Juneteenth), we’re in for a masterpiece.

A majority of the threats are tucked into punchlines. “Bodies in the basement” kicks off a rhyme where the body count stays under the small talk, and the moment of real hurt comes when she translates the violence to rapping: “Wonder why I don’t rap much/‘Cause when I rap, somebody’s bound to get wrapped up.” Rap becomes wrapped up, the word for a corpse in a tarp, so the reason for her silence and the thing she’s ready to do to any aggressor rides the same sound. Seconds later, a similar sickness gag applies: “I’m so sick, I really think you should mask up,” sick read as both unwell and unassailable and the mask as both shield and source of contagions.

She names her rhyming engine: “Sharper than a shark tooth, Whack God, I’m Doc Seuss.” Tooth becomes Seuss, and she crowns herself with the only writer whose entire job description was rhyming.

These softer, emotional moments are rare, kept at the absolute briefest. “Since my brother was in the placement, this disrespect was blatant,” offers a familial detail, then moves on before we can consider the backstory. Her mother receives a single quoted line, “Once you make it, don’t end up like Yazz the Greatest,” a directive passed down and left with no follow-up. The poverty makes one appearance as the raw facts: “We was poor, chicken broth,” wedged into a bar about breaking free. All this passes over the surface, and the bragging snaps shut on it again.

The threat behind it all doesn’t negate the earnest, almost plaintive: “I just want my credit, man, I promise I don’t need cash.” Money is a thread that runs throughout, from the “all about the Benjamins” of the hook to the dentist bars where the braces on her mouth serve as a proxy for the plaques on a wall she believes she’s owed. She claims to work “for the culture” then stands by as her name is omitted, “like it was hard to pronounce,” and the two-faced bars all point back to that simple fact. The hurt is the only line that stands without its double meaning.

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The first night of 2026’s Roots Picnic overran on Belmont Plateau—the wide, green slope in Fairmount Park where the festival made its home this year—and the person who closed it hadn’t performed on a stage in years. He wandered out Saturday in an afro that had grown out and nothing but his voice behind him. Shawn Carter, whose recently-relabeled—with an umlaut—stage name is JAŸ-Z, rapped the entirety of his set a cappella, no beat, no chorus, no features, one verse, from top down to the last bar. The Roots have hosted the festival for two decades, and they were his live band from his 2001 MTV Unplugged set onward, but this time they stood down. Without any beat beneath anything he said, the writing was all that was there, and in it, he constantly divided the room into owners and workers.

When he says, “I still own you suckers, I’ll Marlo you niggas,” it sounds more like a deed. Not a diss (shoutout to The Wire). On the opposite side, Tory Lanez and his Dad, Sonstar Peterson, ain’t safe: “The Roc’s not crumbling, the leprechauns have magically run out of pranks/Your son on the federal jail-line mumbling something/About having, too much in his drink/You know how dumb that is?” The most protracted run goes on the ownership and the publishing of his writing, and everyone in earshot falls to one side of the line. “The crackers got your publishing, gangsta, go talk tough to them,” he raps, then “Don’t talk success to me, you niggas is workers,” then the contract clause: “In perpetuity is how you contract is worded.” The long line of phrases is widely read as a shot directed at Drake, for the issue of him owning his catalog, which, while never specified, provides more emphasis on the lyrics than context. Owner and worker are the only ways he draws the line, and he constantly frames himself as someone who never had to look up at anyone: “Niggas look up to Hov, I never looked up to them.”

His freestyle lives in the ways he picks up and walks away with another’s song. Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” turns in his throat into a threat, “I’m the one who strummed the pain, that hill (Ms. Lauryn Hill) you could die on” turning to “I’m killing ‘em softly, what’s understood don’t need to be explained.” Public Enemy’s “Public Enemy #1” and “911 Is a Joke,” a track on the delayed response time of the cops, turns into “But 911 is a joke, public enemy number one I’ve been ranked,” the nonexistent aid turning to the establishment’s enemy. The Wire is giving him the cadence of the show, the Marlo Stanfield rhyme of “You want it one way, it’s the other” turning into a threat: And he built the value of his name upon the bones of Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name.” Each song becomes a thing that he can command or that he can weaponize; it is not much different from his approach to the publishing of his work, but instead applied to popular songs.

Several of the lines perform double and even triple duty. “It’s gon’ cost you a B to even say my name” brings to bear a B as in billion dollars, a B as in wife with the initial (Beyoncé), and a B as in the title of the Destiny’s Child song on which it’s based, all within a few syllables. His eldest alias conflates the idea that the game is over with the thought of that change coming “My next update, the Jig is up,” and “Wrong chart champ you gotta look up again” conflates looking up with 90x—the concept as well as his standing on the charts (someone surpassed him with the most number one albums as a male solo artist). Personas, as well as the scoreboard, inhabit a handful of the same words. Such density is perhaps the facet of him left nowhere to hide on an empty stage—no one trick pony line offers a surface for a rhyme to latch.

The lawsuit itself looms large in the initial bars; it is recounted from beginning to end from his perspective. The lawyer filing the December 2024 assault complaint against him is described as an “1-800 ambulance chaser,” and the suit is recounted as an attack he ultimately withstood. The suit was dropped and dismissed with prejudice in February 2025, and his attorney reports no money changed hands in connection with it, and he denies the allegation entirely. His bars narrate his own victimization and only that.

“The Roots remember, even when the trees pretend.”

Family bookends the grievance. At the top of the section, his grandmother stands as his foil against the years he spent vindicating his name: “Hattie’s turning a hundred,” and his first threat is that had she died before he cleared his name, he would have tracked down every one involved in playing “these silly games.” Under this interpretation, the entire grievance functions as an act of defense, the name cleared on behalf of someone who perhaps would not have lived to see it cleared. His children also serve a similar role when midway through, “My children is some of them” shares space with “Have you niggas no shame,” both universally accepted as his response to public discussion of his kids, and also fiercely protected just like their names. At the end of the freestyle, he’s back with her again: “Hattie loves her Shawnies,” his grandmother pronouncing his son’s nickname by spelling out “S-H-A-W-N” with an extra letter that makes it that much cuter to him. Her love is perhaps the only thing in this entire package given and not taken.

The politics run is the thing the decoders skate by, and it’s doing much more than what they believe. The rapper’s adversaries are not other musicians: “A rapper cannot be my opp, I have MAGA Republicans,” he rhymes, and “Them shots came from the very top of the government, good luck with ‘em. He asserts that the lawsuit that was filed against him was from politicians and that he is speaking back from a place higher than any level any of them can attain: “I’m governed by God, you tryna break the covenant.” Afterward, the use of a homophone shifts the dispute into currency. “I reign for forty days” can be seen as a decree from a monarch, as well as the deluge of the forty days of rain from the scripture; the torrent that results is directed toward the jewelry: “My neck get flooded again/Wrist’ll get flooded again, my net worth went up again.”

The void left by the removal of the stage is the ideology itself, not cushioned by anything. For thirty years, the music has been powered by one system-the man in ownership against those merely borrowing the time-and now it is present without the beats, without a catchy melody and without someone with the authority to share the burden. The lawsuits, the kids (whether you take it as shots toward Ye or Nicki), the borrowed tunes, Oschino (“That nut ass nigga still stuttering”), Dame Dash (“Niggas teeth is tumbling out they mouth and somehow/I’m the one whodunnit, it’s a murder mystery, gang”), even Jaguar Wright (“Quest introduced me to Jaguar, I don’t know why I still fuck with him”), the discussions of popularity in relation to whomever that may concern; all these things are sifted the same way. He has booked three sold-out nights in Yankee Stadium in July; the conjecture of his first full studio album in almost ten years remains unresolved. Between the grandmother and his offspring, it is the boundary between owner and laborer that he protects most ardently, and in the stark nakedness of the empty stage, he revealed all that with no underpinning other than his own voice.

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The Beatnuts, Take It or Squeeze It

Almost two years after it was released, in clubs the included tracks such as“The Next Episode” and “Still D.R.E.” are still getting spun nonstop since the incident (and you know what I’m talking about), and it’s already said to have logged five million in sales, a monster album you don’t see much these days: Dr. Dre’s 2001. That it’s an album that represents the movement of the scene at a certain time, like A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory and Dre’s own The Chronic, and that it’s the kind of album that goes on to lead hip-hop production afterward, you can tell from the way beat-makers have been raving about 2001 in this magazine’s interviews at the time. With diversification moving ahead, and with gear becoming more advanced and more expensive, now there are skill gaps between producers that would have been unthinkable before, and not everyone can make “2001”-style beats, so it won’t be like how everybody turned G-funk after The Chronic, but you can already hear 2001’s influence on a lot of records.

So what did 2001 present to the scene? One example of the latest version of “hip-hop-pleasant sound and acoustics,” which keeps changing subtly every day in a way even people who aren’t always listening hard to hip-hop wouldn’t notice, but after a long time has totally changed, and a re-recognition of hip-hop itself, meaning the feel-goodness of breakbeats and loops, isn’t that what it is? And especially loops. When I thought about why I like 2001 this much and realized, “ah, I was getting taken out by how good this loop feels,” it was a real eye-opener. The feel-goodness of loops is basically hip-hop’s foundation, isn’t it! So seeing how strongly 2001 is supported made me re-recognize hip-hop, like, damn, everyone really does love that feel-goodness of something going around and around.

That was a ridiculously long preface, but speaking of loops, yeah, The Beatnuts. When they first came out they were mainstream, but starting with the second, Stone Crazy, they began shifting toward production that pushed their Hispanic roots to the front. And when “Off the Books,” with that memorable top-line looped, became a small hit. They probably re-recognized it too, like, “it’s the feel-goodness of the loop, right.” So the third, A Musical Massacre, was also a work where the feel-goodness of loops was emphasized more than ever, but now with the added 2001 effect, The Beatnuts’ fourth record Take It or Sqeeze It, where they’d already gotten out ahead and like a monkey had been chasing nothing but the feel-goodness of loops, feels like it’s become an album that’s back on the front line of the scene again.

It’s already decided just from the hit first single “No Escapin’ This” c/w “It’s da Nuts.” “No Escapin’ This,” the party tune with Greg Nice, like a sequel to “Turn It Up” from the previous album, is great too, but anyway “It’s da Nuts” takes me out. It’s a super tight beat: post-Timbaland drums with the kick going crazy, and just this rockabilly-style, insanely memorable bass. But these drums are a rework of Head Hunters’ “God Make Me Funky,” right? That way of slipping a standard classic sample in as a hidden flavor and making fans grin, they’re really good at it.

“Prendelo (Light It Up),” with Tony Touch on the rap, “Yo Yo Yo,” where Greg Nice hypes again, “Let’s Git Doe,” where Fatman Scoop yells, and “Se Acabo (Remix),” where Method Man jumps on a previous-album track that had been floating around as a promo single, and the other songs too, that feel-goodness of loops works its way in slowly, like, ziiiing. Compared to the previous album they loosened their shoulders and made what they wanted, a nice-feeling adult hip-hop. Psycho Les and JuJu are beat craftsmen to begin with, so their rap, their voices, their lyrics, their skill, are plain (sorry), so it wasn’t a huge break. — Nia Lattimore

Fredro Starr, Firestarr

In Vibe magazine’s first issue of 1999, Sticky Fingaz was already written up as “ex-Onyx,” so it’s been quite a while since Onyx stopped moving. In Onyx, Sticky was the one who stood out overwhelmingly as a character through his name, face, and muscles, and he did stand out, but compared to him, who centers that anything-goes irregular flow, this Fredro can be evaluated as an MC in a straight, orthodox line.

On this record, his solo debut after doing acting, you can fully enjoy that low, raspy voice. The advance single that became a hit, “Dyin’ 4 Rap,” is good. Over rhythmic strings in the DMX “What’s My Name” line, he explodes into a hot delivery like spit’s about to fly. Even if it doesn’t have a hook that feels like a hook, you get forced down by rap power. Also, “Soldierz,” where he goes at it with his ally Sticky and X1 over a Rough Ryders-type sound, is dope, and at the same time it’s a song that lets you breathe easier like, thank god they didn’t split in a bad way. And “Thug Warz,” with Sticky (the one doing the “throw ya gunz up” call) and the Outlawz, is also in that dramatic & hard lane.

On the other hand, on “What If,” the dried-out lane, he gives you a flat, matter-of-fact narration, and on “Perfect B!tch” he humorously talks through picturing a “perfect woman” made by combining Tamia, Aaliyah, Jennifer, Beyoncé, and others… and he also shows sides that step one or two steps beyond the Onyx-era act that was heavy on the tough-guy color. There are a lot of good songs, and the lead has more than enough ability, a solid, full work. — Yara Blake

Jigmastas, Infectious

Starting with tasteful, well-picked hip-hop, gradually moving into a breakbeats corner. From there taking it into house, and after that, staying mellow until morning. Spinna’s DJing is really the kind my people would enjoy. He apparently spins nothing but soul and funk at bars too. But that’s kind of like free soul. It’s the most fun DJing, but it also made me feel lonely, like, this guy has completely turned his back on the hip-hop game, this must feel comfortable for him. And then, the first full album from his base group Jigmastas shows up. It surprised me, but this is a wonderful work.

Overall the drums step away from the value system of “dope,” and have a jazzy sound like club-jazz-type down-tempo stuff. On top of that, the complex texture of the interweaving top parts unfolds. Especially the beauty of “Apology Not Accepted (featuring Apani B. Fly),” with his ally Apani from Polyrhythm Addicts, is this album’s climax. There are also songs with sung choruses that underground fans might hate (I said it lightly), like “Elevate (featuring Angela Johnson),” “Hollar (featuring James Ramsey and Vernon Reid),” and “Nocturnal Jam (featuring Lorenda Robinson),” and there are also a lot of spiky productions like “Don’t Get It Twisted (featuring Sadat X),” where the beat develops over a field recording from a tap dance classroom too.

As expected, it floats away from every movement in the current hip-hop scene, but it has that taut, stretched beauty unique to someone who voluntarily stepped outside the game. — Alexandria Elise

J-Live, The Best Part

The info that J-Live became a free agent from London Records and his catalog was up for sale is read about years ago. So I thought this was what finally got a buyer and came out, but according to his management, 7 Heads, this is a boot, which is a problem (in fact, there are tracks leaking online that aren’t included here, and “Play” is the instrumental of “Don’t Play”). Because like he argues on “True School Anthem,” produced by DJ Spinna, if you’re a “true school” believer this is a must-hear.

In other words, it’s a sound full of adventurous creativity (it’s especially clear in “Don’t Play,” a samba-ish thing produced by 88 Keys where J-Live responds as if to Astrud Gilberto’s voice, and in “Yes!,” which used swing jazz earlier than Jurassic 5, who seem like they’d share a hip-hop view), and words that only he can spit are always running through it. For example, on “Wax Paper,” produced by Prince Paul, turntablism terms are used perfectly as metaphors for a criminal society.

And since this record is titled after the DJ Premier-produced track, you can also interpret it as a documentary-style story of J-Live (born in 1978, real name Jean-Jacques Cadet) becoming a great MC (the fact that his ‘95 debut track, famous for strong battle rhymes, sits right before the last track is probably because of that), and it becomes even more worth listening to. So if this had come out properly in complete form in 1998 or 1999, there’s no question it would have been one of the records representing that year. — Danica Ford

Various Artists, Oz: The Soundtrack

As usual, details are unclear, but it’s a soundtrack for an HBO broadcast drama series. Most of the participants don’t step outside their own lanes, so as a concept compilation its “interestingness” is average, but that’s a separate matter from how the songs are individually. First, it’s a shame that Kurupt and Nate Dogg and Wu-Tang aren’t more than expected. The following Snoop track, “Land of Oz,” is funk that’s way too square, but the chorus hook with Kokane, like always, is full-on P-funk and an irresistible comfort.

The relatively plain Krayzie Bone track “Shackled Up” is good too. The horns and keys fall in little bits, and Krayzie’s talking, starting kind of song-like and gradually increasing the word count, is an atmosphere thing. Def Jef, back on the front line, is doing good work. And Devin, who made a name with Dre’s “Fuck You,” on “Can’t Wait,” rides a simple, commercial-beat sound from T-Mix with sing-rap, a wimpy-soul. On the drama theme, “Oz Theme 2000,” Kool G Rap is by far the best. Cypress Hill’s “Can I Live” is a fine song with an atmosphere really similar to their own “Highlife.” Trick Daddy’s “Thug Niggas Don’t Live That Long” is an absurdly laid-back, refreshing up (when everyone does this, why does everyone turn into 2Pac?). Drag-On’s “Tonight” feels like Swizz Beatz part 1.

The highlights of the second half are either Magic’s “Incarcerated,” still continuing to transform, or… with so many strong-character people, there are a lot of song-level dramatic things that stand out, which is soundtrack-like, maybe? — L. Ari James

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Gabe P launched On the Radar Radio out of New York as an invite-only freestyle platform with no paid submissions and no co-sign economy, just a booth, a beat, and whoever he decided deserved the mic. Over a decade of running it that way, the platform built its name on finding rappers before the industry found them, or sometimes never finding them and putting them on record anyway: Polo G came through before the deal, local drill artists cut footage while they were still anonymous, and a long roll of unsigned artists got a camera on their face while everyone in their phone contacts was still calling them dreamers. Of course, everything changed, although we’ll reserve some criticism for another post. The New Class Cypher is a newer format, ten rappers in sequence on one beat, no host interstitials, no filler, and Ovrkast., who also raps on it, built the instrumental himself. MARCO PLUS, Reuben Vincent, Marlon Craft, Ben Reilly, SWAVAY, NAHSAAN, La Reezy, Ray Vaughn, and Chris Patrick fill the rest. Most of them have been at this long enough to know they should be further along, and the cypher is where that knowledge either sharpens into something or stays resentment.

Before the notoriety arrived, Reuben Vincent was at Mrs. Winner’s, mortified over a chicken dinner he could barely afford, and that single image earns everything built around it: the institutional neglect section moving through the FDA to pediatricians to poverty televised until the cycle looks like weather, and the Kanye line he closes with, “Who these kids gonna listen to?/I guess me, ‘cause it damn sure isn’t you.” He pulls that quote as a co-sign already earned rather than credibility borrowed. MARCO PLUS opens before him and has the same emotional material, a partner in a cell he owes commas to, a daughter to keep fresh, friends who call him brother while rooting for him to fail, and buried somewhere in the middle, “I took so many drugs ‘cause I ain’t really tryna feel.” That is the core of his verse, and it receives the same weight as everything around it.

Ovrkast. built the room and then rapped in it, which required finding something worth saying after already doing the structural work. He keeps it short and stays in the present tense: ICE on his morning timeline, Somalians targeted, white stones cycling through his neighborhood, a parenthetical (“Yeah, I made the beat, too”). Marlon Craft comes in behind him carrying a decade. The Pete Rose comparison frames the verse from the jump, bet on yourself hard enough in this game and they will find a reason to ban you, and the genealogy bars that follow are the most technically precise moment on the full recording: “There’s no you without me, you in my family tree/Or make us hit your whole style with the twenty-three and me.” He is accusing people who benefited from his influence of intellectual lineage and folding a plagiarism claim into a DNA metaphor without ever becoming a complaint. “This ain’t AI, I got this good from practicing” may be the most precisely dated line on this cypher.

Our friendly neighborhood Ben Reilly arrives. “He chimed in and got left hanging” is the cypher’s tightest compression, and the verse keeps the rate up through the bear/bare knuckle doubling, “do not test Damon,” the Sydney Sweeney coupe, a punchline architecture that keeps most listeners half a bar behind. Then his partner died before he was twenty-one. His grandmother has dementia, and he converts that directly into a defense against anyone misremembering how things went between them: “When you go and jog your memory, this wrong what you remember.” The verse stays honest about its own methods: “I can’t be hiding rap disses under profound words.” In a format where most rappers brag or confess, Reilly does both. SWAVAY goes somewhere else entirely. His whole verse is addressed to God, not as reverence but as a conversation with someone he knows well enough to be honest with, admitting he robbed someone for a Mac in 2017 and that person later sent a feature, that his chain costs an Acura, that he does not believe in manifestation because chasing signs is like acknowledging God while refusing to ever dap Him up. His girlfriend got annoyed at a Mariah the Scientist line mid-verse, he clocked the tension, wrote it in, and kept going. The prayer at the close asks God to just let him drop this year is the most human moment on the cypher.

Proof’s son NAHSAAN calls out Revolt and Rob Markman by name, on camera, saying any rankings of the hardest young rappers that skip the young rappers are agenda-driven and paid. The grievance is specific, the targets are named, and the willingness to lodge it publicly in a room where the footage is already rolling is harder than most of what surrounds it. What follows is weaker: LeBron, Michael Jackson, reborn, hypothetical opponents ready to swing. West Seven Mile to the Bluff is where the verse actually lives, and the bars that do not touch Detroit need more evidence than they carry. La Reezy is twenty-one, recently engaged, just turned the age he is rapping from, and he decided early in his verse that posture was the correct bet to make before the catalog could fully back it. “I don’t even need Gabe to confirm that I’m on the radar, ‘cause I’m the lightsaber” is his best line, using the platform’s own name to reject dependence on it, and the lightsaber swap is goofy enough that a cleaner version would stick less. The hurricane metaphor for his ten-month impact is a claim rather than a case, and at twenty-one, that may still be the right move.

“I do a whole lot of straightening, might as well put me on a S-curl box.” That line sits halfway through Ray Vaughn’s verse (he absolutely steals the show), and everything before and after it is about exactly that cost. He opens with Black history and photographers protecting his image, managing representation before he says what he came to say, then moves into what the straightening requires: white feet on the culture, emulate the blueprint, monetize the movement, discard the humans. It has been said before in this genre, but Vaughn delivers it as a live account rather than a cultural citation, and the difference is audible. “I bust down my AP and still screaming, ‘Fuck ICE!’” drops personal luxury and political rage into the same bar without staging the irony. He kisses his daughters before he leaves the house. His circle is compact because he pruned it deliberately. “It’s my week” at the close carries everything that happened with his name in it during the spring of 2025—the Joey Bada$$ orbit, REASON, all of it—and it draws a line after absorbing months of unsolicited noise. Nothing else here is as fully inhabited from first bar to last.

And we have one of our rappers to watch this year, Chris Patrick closes it out with some personal bars: “My mama sometimes fearful she gon’ end up like her mama/Multiple sclerosis diagnosis, an obstacle/According to the CDC, there still ain’t no cure for it.” Doing the impossible is not a pose here. It is the actual assignment. The Nas approval stamp, the JID tour where the merch moved while his stomach was still grumbling, and four months of output outrunning what other rappers built over careers. These are coordinates of a career in motion mapped.

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This series revisits five rap albums from 2006 the way you’d recheck a year you thought you already understood. Not for nostalgia, not to rank “classics,” but to see what still holds when the tricks are no longer new and the industry has changed. Twenty years later, 2006 is the year of snap and ringtone-era minimalism proving how little a hit needs, veterans showing a second wind can be real, debuts arriving after years of groundwork, and underground records using self-imposed rules as advantage.

Juvenile, Reality Check

Hot take: I have never once given an S-grade perfect score in this publication scoring machine. But for this album I’d give it 5 stars. That’s how strong the follow-up is. Of course, since I’m saying that here, I’m not in a position to assign a score this column, but the basis for calling it “perfect” is that there’s only one track you don’t need to listen to: “Say It to Me Now.” I’ll write it clearly: this is an even more fully loaded work than Juve’s own representative classic 400 Degreez (‘98). Having two peak periods, that’s an enviable life, huh. I know, fight me in the comments.

Why is Juve this incredible. First, there’s the irresistible appeal of his voice. Well, on the previous album it sounded like it had faded, but this time, not only is it back, it comes at you with even more weight and variation, so there’s nothing to complain about (the peculiar pronunciation where “building” becomes “bidann” is still there). And his flow is diverse. It’s rhythmical, he can go off-beat, and he can sing. And the worst thing, more than anything, is that the hook ideas are incredibly varied. While ordinary rappers reuse one idea across many songs, Juve throws multiple ideas into a single song. I don’t know any other rapper who can make the pre-hook bridge sections this luxuriously. Also, his ear for choosing tracks with a wide range of tendencies, including self-imposed constraints, feels like a specialty product.

The songs you can point to here become like a whole crowd living on, each with a different color and face. Following the intro, “Get Ya Hustle On” is orthodox South, bounce-to-crunk, but after that it’s a mass of variety: “Sets Go Up,” which is like turning crunk and R&B into hip-hop; “Rodeo,” where Juve sings a mellow sing-rap over a bright mid-tempo track; “Way I Be Leanin’,” where a hook blending running hi-hats with screw connects bounce, crunk, and screw; “Animal,” whose hook “Bao~n!” won’t leave your ears; “Holla Back,” where even meaningless lyrics like “waa-aa-aat~ ee-he~” are more than enough to make you listen; “I Know You Know,” where Trey Songz earnestly sings lyrics calming a wife who worries about infidelity while he’s out; and “Addicted,” a rich one where Brian McKnight’s singing and Juve’s voice intersect, and even the second ballad is fun. Anyway, it’s a work that seems to have four or five times as many things to hear as an ordinary album. — Devon Kai Brooks

Dem Franchise Boyz, On Top of Our Game

Isn’t it that almost nobody thought someone could transform this dramatically. Even at the time of the self-titled major debut (2004) that Raheem was also involved with, there was already a minor hit like “White Tee,” but the situation surrounding this So So Def transfer album that came out under Jermaine Dupri’s guidance has become outrageous. As is well known, the advance cut “I Think They Like Me (Remix),” with Dupri himself plus Bow Wow and Da Brat on guest spots, has grown into a huge hit that snatched No. 1 on the R&B chart. Of course, you could explain it as something that hits the dead center of trends, since it rides the minimalist snap-tracks that could only thrive in an era where D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” can take the top of the national overall chart, but you must not forget that the song was originally pre-included on So So Def’s Young & Fly / Fast & Fresh Vol. 1 last year, and if you trace it further back, it’s a remix of “Oh I Think Dey Like Me” from the above-mentioned debut. The guy whose way of riding the current is different, I guess.

This album also has that in-season vibe, but surprisingly, the patron Dupri only took part in production alongside LRoc on “My Music,” which invites Bun B as a guest, rubs in a Pimp C “Hogg in the Game” quote, and skillfully produces a dope flavor like a proper H-Town beat. And the new tracks by Pimpin, who handled a lot on the previous album, are now limited to only “Bricks 4 the High,” which brings in Jim Jones and Damon Dash. Lately, the veteran DJ Montay (from the group’s camp) also provides the best trap tune “Suckas Come ’n’ Try Me,” but the majority of the beats were handled by up-and-coming craftsmen like Young Juve, who also handled “Freaky as She Wanna Be” where Trey Songz rings out a glossy vocal, and Maestro Brooks, who handled the catchy “Don’t Play with Me” featuring Three 6 Mafia. Fellow member Parlae is also involved in making the sticky “Lean wit It, Rock wit It.” Depending on the song there are moments that feel a bit lacking in twist, but wouldn’t you say it’s a solid work that easily clears a certain level across the board. This album backs up the fact that an Atlanta act, which is now less and less boosted just by “regionality,” is hitting its highest harvest period, and at the same time it’s also something that forecasts So So Def’s 2006. The meaning of the main body being finished to this level of completion is extremely big. — Brandon O’Sullivan

Remy Ma, There’s Something About Remy: Based on a True Story

As the lone women member of Terror Squad, appearing on works by M.O.P., the late Big Pun, Big Leb, and others, with a Loud debut also planned, this is Remy Ma (Terror)’s first album. During an overly long waiting period she ran through a wide range of features, from Nelly to Three 6 Mafia joints, and in the end she arrives after a steady setup. Above all, TS’s “True Story,” where she held the mic on seven songs including that “Lean Back,” was big, just as the subtitle of this album suggests. The Swizz Beatz-made upper “Whuteva” and the Scott Storch joint “Conceited (There’s Something About Remy)” that he finished with that familiar exotic mood have already become advance hits, but if those two fit into mainstream templates, then the other tracks express Remy’s original appeal in a more multifaceted way. With Pun’s spoken intro pulled from Pun’s “Ms. Martin,” there’s “Light’s, Camera, Action” that uses a Treacherous Three track, and there’s also “Thug Love” where she pseudo-collabs with an unreleased Pun verse; from a David Banner-made club banger to combinations with Ne-Yo and Keyshia Cole (perfect match!), and with I.V. Queen, she handles it freely, and her full-bodied rapping is just too cool. No complaints all the way to the ending on “Still,” where sentimental piano pours down. Still, the cover punning on “Mary ni kubittake” is fine, but the sexy (?) photomontage-style image on the inner jacket might be a little unpleasant. — Cierra Marcel

Aceyalone, Magnificent City

For an MC like Aceyalone who doesn’t necessarily treat on-beat rhyming as common sense, isn’t he always worrying about what kind of tracks he needs. He has kept putting out works while repeating trial and error, but on this album he has RJD2 handle the entire thing, the same partner from “Love And Hate.” The diversity of the tracks themselves rivals RJD2’s own Since We Last Spoke, but the first two grabs, “All for U,” with cheerful mariachi-style horns, and “Fire,” which is funky and charging, are beats that, for an RJD2 work, are unusually something you could just play in a club (by his standards, experimentally the other way around!), so you get lightly surprised. But that thought doesn’t last long: from “Here & Now” onward it’s coated in a sound you could call proper RJD2. Even the beat on “Junior” feels like Kim is about to come out. For Aceyalone, and for RJD2, many listeners hold an image of each as a set of common traits. And they simply think, if those two connect well it will become something amazing, and they expect it. Of course, since these two teamed up, there’s no question it’s above a certain level. But for Acey, he probably saw through those expectations and, even though every track is an RJD2 beat, he chose to create under a kind of constraint, rhyming on-beat, and he likely aimed for the creativity born from that and the interest inside it. — Harry Brown

Dilated Peoples, 20/20

If there’s that guy from Blackalicious who got to do what he wanted on a major, didn’t sell, got dropped, and right after that calmly made an annual top-10-class album, then in the case of Dilated Peoples, who with this album count it as their third major-label record, what is it like. It makes me wonder. Because it can’t be only that they brought in Kanye West, but listener opinion on the previous album seemed to be summarized in one word as “a subtle work,” and if the title means “staring reality in the face,” then even more so. They start with the Alchemist-produced upper “Back Again” and seem to want to signal a handoff. But there’s DJ Babu’s one-man show “The One and Only,” and not only “You Can’t Hide, You Can’t Run,” which is theirs, putting out a positive message from what looks like a negative angle, but there’s also “Firepower (The Tables Have to Turn),” a new direction that, as a result of seeking hip-hop’s source in reggae, invites Capleton. Still, overall, it somehow feels like they’re using the previous album as a mold. And then it’s closed with the Alchemist-produced title track “20/20,” and just from listening to the chorus, it’s not only “staring reality in the face,” but also clearly keeping the future in view, and when looking back at the past, a sharp insight is shown. This isn’t a concept album, but when it continues alongside the other tracks, it targets a wide range, not a narrow “scene,” and even beyond “Neighborhood Watch,” and in that sense it surpasses the previous album. — Nehemiah

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Every year and a half, somebody with a rap career and a grudge logs on to announce that the new generation can’t hold a candle. CyHi picked February, aka Black History Month, to do it. Days ago, he typed that today’s lyricists are “a bunch of straight A students who dropped out of college they sophomore year to be rappers. You can tell they don’t have any life experiences they’re just good with words.” People in his replies tore him apart within the hour, mostly because he spent the last decade putting words in Kanye West’s mouth for a living, the same Kanye who built an entire persona around ditching school. CyHi didn’t flinch—he said what he said and told everybody who didn’t like it “oh well.”

Then he dropped a song, and on a song the rules change, because Twitter awards you points for having an opinion while a record makes you prove it.

“No Competition” opens with CyHi pulling a slick move. “I’d like to take this chance to apologize,” Connor McGregor’s infamous speech announces, and before you can register the apology he banks straight into a résumé. Before Jimmy Fallon, he had to meet Jimmy Henchman—that’s James Rosemond, the music industry power broker doing federal time on drug trafficking and murder-for-hire convictions. Before he had any equipment, he had “amigo in Arizona send me a shipment.” The bars are doing exactly what the tweets did. CyHi wants his street passport stamped before he spits a single punchline, and the Henchman name isn’t casual. That’s a real figure from a real era of label-adjacent violence. Most of the rappers CyHi is mad at wouldn’t drop that reference and wouldn’t know why it carries weight.

He moves quick from there. “I keep my enemies close cuz I feel we distant/Or get killed by a friendly ‘cause I don’t see any difference.” Standard paranoia bar, competent, nothing wild. Then a Willie Lynch allusion about Black division (“Still be a Willie Lynching cuz niggas never heal from defeat”), and he bends that last word into a Kobe Achilles pun. Clever, and CyHi has always been clever. Since he snuck his verse onto “So Appalled” back in 2010 while Kanye was sleeping in the studio, his whole reputation rests on the fact that he can cram more syllable tricks into sixteen bars than most MCs fit into a full project.

After the Henchman reference and the Lynch allusion—two bars that actually connect biography to lyricism the way his Twitter rant demanded—CyHi sprays everywhere. His woman is unapproachable and won’t even notice you, dudes act emotional, somebody’s getting thrown in a trunk, there’s a Trump voting reference, and before you can catch your breath he’s bounced to Master P, Prince, and Dream in rapid succession. A female voice, maybe his wife, warns him to watch his positioning and remember what Ye told him. Inside of maybe twenty bars, the verse touches seven or eight subjects and commits to none of them, each line swinging to outdo the last one instead of building anywhere specific.

Ye handles the hook, or the scratches on “there is no competition” multiple times flat and CyHi tags it with “behind every bar is a celebration.” Late-era Kanye hooks have a certain laziness to them, and this one fits—he sounds bored, which maybe suits a song called “No Competition” but also puts CyHi’s voice next to the man who proved more forcefully than anybody alive that you don’t need a street background to gut people with rap music. Before loving MAGA and Hitler, Kanye made “Jesus Walks” and “Runaway” and “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” none of which came from the drug trade, all of which cut deeper than ninety percent of records made by people with the exact credentials CyHi says are mandatory.

Wedged between the verses, an interlude plays audio of somebody, sounds like Sway or maybe another radio personality (for real, it sounded like Big Sean), praising CyHi’s cipher ability and admitting they wouldn’t battle him. It’s supposed to reinforce his dominance. What it actually does is salute the exact thing CyHi complained about on Twitter: being good with words. The whole tweet storm was about how vocabulary without biography falls short. Here’s CyHi getting praised for vocabulary.

Second verse, same motor. “None of y’all could mumble off my wonderful monologues/Some of the most iconic [rappers] you would stumble across/For my ciphers was on the blog.” He name-checks writing “So Appalled” rapping, “I was involved with that life before I wrote So Appalled,” and now the record has a genuinely interesting tension. CyHi claims he lived the street life BEFORE he got his pen up, which is supposed to separate him from the college rappers he’s criticizing, and fair enough. Except the line burns by in two seconds, and instead of parking on that distinction and letting it breathe, he’s already onto condom jokes (“Magnum on my dick/I can’t afford to take the condom off”), Applebee’s punchlines (“Serve your whole fam in the booth/Welcome to Applebees”), and strawberry daiquiri riffs.

The rhyme schemes, though. “Emphatically the last [one] to get mad at me/Automatically put on/The moving Africans rapidly through Atlanta.” That’s a quadruple-stacked internal scheme, and most working MCs would need three takes just to pronounce it clean. CyHi rattles it off like he’s reading a grocery list. The pen talent has never been in question—five Grammy nominations for songwriting, co-credits on “Sicko Mode” and “Famous” and “Father Stretch My Hands,” records for Kanye and Travis and Pusha T. The man can flat-out rap.

So why does “No Competition” feel like watching somebody warm up instead of perform? CyHi told the world he wanted rap grounded in real life, in scars, in the friction between survival and craft. He said words alone aren’t enough. Then he cut a record that is almost entirely words. The Henchman bar and the Arizona shipment bar and the “So Appalled” credential check are the only moments where his biography shows up with any weight. Everything else with the puns, the Applebee’s line, the condom joke, the woman-at-the-photo-shoot detour, could’ve been penned by any sharp MC with a thesaurus and no felonies.

He wraps the second verse with “contractually she going to always come running back to me” because “There is no competition,” folding a relationship brag into the title like he’s signing a deal nobody offered. The outro rolls in. Sway or whoever again, muttering about going bar-for-bar and conceding “I really really don’t want it.” Then a voice, maybe CyHi’s own: “I’m telling you, easy.”

Easy. That’s the last word on a record built to answer whether CyHi can back up his public stance about what real rap requires. And “easy” is the right description for what the song delivers technically. CyHi made this look easy. What he didn’t make it look is necessary. The bars prove he belongs in any cipher on earth. They don’t prove that his particular life (the 2021 highway shooting, the years ghostwriting behind a locked door, the Stone Mountain upbringing) puts something on wax that a gifted college dropout couldn’t match with enough practice. He had that song in him, but cut a different one.

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“Y’all toddlers to me, stop botherin’ me
Young Simba, some niggas threw some hate my way
But only thing they should say is, ‘Cole, you like a father to me.’” — J. Cole on “Bronx Zoo Freestyle.”

Everybody wants to talk about fathers right now. The word gets tossed around in interviews and captions like it costs nothing, like calling yourself somebody’s dad is the same as raising them. A whole corner of rap has settled into this posture where the older guys expect the younger ones to kneel, and the younger ones either comply or get called ungrateful. Meanwhile, the people who were supposed to hold the line when it mattered walked away from the biggest test the culture handed them in years. Symba walks into all of that with "Father Figure," and the first thing he does is refuse to simplify it. He grabs Drake’s “Stories About My Brother” beat produced by Conductor Williams, stitched from family loyalty and brothers bragging on each other, and repurposes it for a song where family is the open wound. That beat selection alone is a quiet provocation. A record originally built for celebrating your people, now carrying the weight of questioning whether those same people raised you crooked.

It seems like that man is being used for a diss record nowadays. But not this one.

The opening verse begins with a birth year.

“Pops was born in ‘73; he had love for the streets.”

That puts his father squarely in the generation raised on crack-era New York and West Coast gangsta rap, which means Symba is immediately telling you what kind of curriculum he inherited. His dad had women everywhere, “a kid on every street,” barely knew himself at twenty-something, and still managed to leave behind a complete education in image.

“He taught me how to dress, how to talk, how to finesse
How to flex, how to check, how to step, how to press.”

A full syllabus in performing manhood without ever being asked whether the performance is hollow. His father handed him swagger before he offered him stability, schooled him on how to move like a player before the kid even understood what a relationship was supposed to require. “He barely knew himself, ain’t teach me what he didn’t know,” pins the tragedy right there. You can’t pass down self-knowledge you never earned. What transfers instead is the hustle, the image maintenance, the ability to walk into a room looking like you’ve figured it out while your insides are bare. That’s a seductive model for a young Black man, because it produces results in public. Attention, women, respect. The bill arrives later, privately, when you realize the only version of yourself you own is the costume.

Then the turn hits. “Hip-hop is my pop, but that’s just how I was raised.” The whole first verse retroactively becomes a description of the culture itself. Every quality he pinned to his father (flashy, absent but present, a way with words, money problems, never really home) fits rap as an institution just as tightly. Hip-hop moved out west looking for room to compete. It planted a kid on every block. It drilled millions of boys on how to dress and talk and finesse before it ever showed them how to grieve or hold still. That swap from literal father to cultural father rewrites the entire argument, because the personal story was an accusation all along. And Symba lets the double meaning just sit there, breathing.

The second verse digs into damage. “Pops had a dark side I ain’t see at first/The fame and the flash was a mask to cover up his hurt.” That’s a clean portrait of what hip-hop looked like to kids in the ‘90s and 2000s, all gold and bravado on the surface, self-destruction running underneath the floorboards. “Had me thinking love was soft, showing pain’s the worst” is devastating if you grew up in a house or a neighborhood where that was the unspoken law. Symba is describing an upbringing where burying your feelings is the first lesson and spending recklessly is the second. “Taught me how to get money but not how to keep it” applies to a hundred rappers who went broke after their first deal. “He fed the whole block, everybody ate/Put his people on, showed them different ways” covers the part of the father you brag about, the generosity, the communal loyalty, the plate-passing. Then the turn: “He could save you and destroy you, that’s the gift and curse/Angel and a demon, hard to tell what came first.” This father, this genre, can pay your rent and gut your self-worth in the same afternoon.

“Gave me scars, gave me bars, don’t know which is which
Made me rich, made me sick, ain’t that a bitch.”

That couplet is the sharpest thing on the record. He can’t untangle what rap did for his career from what it did to his head. The scars and the bars occupy the same body. The money and the sickness share a bloodstream. He could’ve gone scorched-earth after all that. He goes somewhere harder.

“I can’t hate him for his flaws ‘cause it’s all he knew.”

That’s a grown-up sentence. The genre was incomplete, and it passed along what it had, and what it had was warped, and the kids who absorbed it inherited the warp with no manual for correction.

Verse three widens the family photograph, and it’s a crowded frame. Pac handed down rage, B.I.G. left behind warnings, Snoop provided the cool, and E-40 taught the slang. Wayne and Game were the alien brothers. Ye fed them soul and then starved them of it. Drake carried the name worldwide while Cudi and Roddy wrote the melodies, YoungBoy supplied the motor, Kendrick ground the pen to a blade, and Cole convinced everybody they belonged in the same sentence as the greats. Think about the kind of composite man all of those fathers build. A person wired for confrontation from birth, who reads every challenge as a call to answer, who has never once been told that silence could be a strategy.

“We was raised to go to war, that’s the code we knew
And when one of us get challenged, we expect to see it through.”

And then the person who wrote half the textbook for that doctrine fails its biggest exam.

“Cole is our reflection, that’s what really hurt us more
Kendrick pressed, Cole stepped back, never seen that before.”

That word, “reflection,” carries more weight than anything else on the track. Cole was the proof that discipline and pen skill could survive any pressure. When Cole walked away, Symba lost a version of himself that he’d been banking on for years. The most honest stretch of the song follows.

“It had me questioning what was all of the training for
Maybe standing down is standing up, ain’t think of that before.”

He’s admitting he never once considered retreat as an option, and that admission frightens him. The code he grew up under had no clause for surrender-as-wisdom. And the Marvin Gaye flip is literal. Marvin Gaye was killed by his own father. Symba is saying, in plain language, this art form will not be the thing that destroys me. “This Marvin Gaye won’t get smoked by his father, nigga.” He’s drawing a line in dirt. He was raised by hip-hop, he owes hip-hop, and he is refusing to die the way hip-hop’s children keep dying. Burned out, bitter, or muted into nothing.

The closing run, “I’m a troubled brother, but honestly I love all you niggas/Hip-hop, that’s our only motherfucking father figure,” doesn’t settle a single thing. He’s wounded by rap, he still claims rap, and he’s not pretending he has a fix. The door stays open to Cole. The disappointment stays on the table. The rules he was raised under sit next to the new and terrifying possibility that they were never complete. Symba holds love and disappointment in the same fist and lets you watch him tremble.

Does the song say something necessary? Yes. Every other response record in this cycle picked a winner or cashed a side-bet. Symba is the only one who paused long enough to ask whether the game itself raised him wrong. The writing is specific, the concept holds airtight, and the beat selection is cannier than it needed to be. Where the song stumbles is in the second verse’s middle stretch, where a few couplets lean on parallel phrasing hard enough to blunt some of the conversational momentum the rest of the track sustains. And the name-drop roll call in verse three risks reading as fan service if you aren’t tracking the argument underneath it. Those are scratches on a car that still runs clean.

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Two days. That’s how long the Kendrick diss lasted before Cole pulled it from streaming, stood on the Dreamville stage, and called the track the lamest shit he ever made. He told the crowd the song disrupted his peace, that he’d rather take K-Dot’s best shot on the chin than keep competing for a crown he didn’t actually want. The retreat surprised people who expected fireworks. It confirmed something for those who’d been paying attention.

Now he delivers the first song from The Fall-Off, the album he’s teased since 2018, and the armature couldn’t fit better. The verse runs his entire life in reverse, influenced by Nas’s “Rewind.” Funeral to pre-birth. Achievements unmake themselves. Time moves wrong. The album’s trailer, dropped the same day, features a voiceover about how fame is supposed to end, how falling off is natural, how people always want to blame mistakes instead of accepting that success was never meant to last. Cole leans all the way into the thesis.

He opens at his own funeral with grandchildren carrying his coffin, tears rising back into their eyes. Fast forward sixty years and the first thing he mentions is winning verse of the year, his purpose “to murk whoever dare flirt with death.” Achievement and mortality in the same breath. Even posthumous honor framed as labor.

The middle section cuts deepest. As time rewinds, he watches his son disappear back into his wife’s womb. Their visits to the nurse decline into nothing. Then the detail that lands hardest. He takes the wedding ring off her finger. Walks backwards up the aisle “to a narrower dirt.” The path shrinks as commitment unravels. No moralizing about temptation. Just verbs. The ring removal. The aisle reversal. The single status reclaimed.

What follows is the hedonism segment and Cole writes it cold. Clubs. Cameras. Blogs yappin. A woman he can see through her skirt. The squad searching for “new hoes” who are “unaware of their worth.” Encore cheers from merch-wearing fans. None of it sounds fun. The party years rendered as routine, obligation, the mechanics of a lifestyle rather than its pleasures. When the income thins and the cosigns diminish, when he’s just another hungry kid praying for a deal with one of “the so-called kings of this rap thing,” the whole climb reveals itself as preparation for this descent.

The final stretch strips everything away. His mother cuts on the cable and his motivation ends. He grows shorter. Pampers cover his hind quarters. He watches his father walk back into his life “and it clears up a hurt.” What made that line stand out is the reversal that makes reunion feel like abandonment in slow motion. If time runs backwards, his father leaving becomes his father arriving. Cole gets named, handed to a doctor, and watches his spirit revert. The phrase closes the track twice. “I’m no longer here on this Earth.” He sounds tired. Almost relieved.

The backwards structure forces compression. He can’t dawdle because time keeps pulling him away from each moment. Whether this signals The Fall-Off’s direction or just its opening statement remains unclear. But as a reintroduction, the priorities are plain. He’s not chasing anyone, nor proving anything. He’s inventorying what he built and watching it unmake itself, piece by piece.

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Street rap has always had its accountants—cats who tally debts and settle them with interest. But most records at least pretend there's feeling underneath the arithmetic. “LiFE 4 A LiFE” doesn’t bother. IDK and Pusha T built this thing as a ledger, murder and money and reputation feeding into the same column, grief shoved so far to the margins it barely registers. Anything short of murder barely registers as serious. The only real currency is life itself, and debts get paid in kind. Both rappers know the math corrodes whoever keeps it. They keep it anyway.

Backed by a dark beat by KAYTRANADA, IDK tells you where he learned the math. “Dreamt about this shit when I was back on lockdown/I learned my shit inside the pound.” Prison was the classroom. What you dream about in there becomes what you do when you get out. “I’m trying to get him for his crown” and “Death before dishonor, tell a nigga calm down” land in the same breath—ambition and warning fused. The pound sharpened the calculation; it didn’t soften anything. The crown he wants belongs to someone else, and he learned on lockdown that transfers require violence.

What’s wild is how clean IDK keeps his personal space while the work gets handled elsewhere. “Bumpin’ jazz while my bitch clean the house, she keep it fresh/She don’t know my niggas en route to leave a mess.” Meanwhile his people are creating carnage across town. She doesn’t know. That’s the whole point—he keeps her separate from what pays for the jazz and the clean house. “I wish I could change how my niggas like to live/The problem is the change ain’t enough to pay the bills.” He names the wish for something different. Then he names why it can’t happen. The bills don’t care about your conscience. “So for what the ice worth, they gon’ leave your body chill.” Twenty dollars on a head. Jewelry and corpses priced in the same sentence.

“They live inside of hell while my life is hella blessed.” IDK can see the gap between where he sits and where his people struggle. He doesn’t pretend he can close it. And that’s the trap: “Wish that I could change how they think, it got me stressed.” He wants out of the cycle. He wants his people to want out. But wanting costs money, and money comes from the cycle. The wish gets named and canceled in two lines. The stress stays. The ledger stays open.

Pusha T comes in and takes the ledger public, already delivering a verse of the contender. Where IDK tallied local scores, Push is talking hierarchy, media, class. “Knockin’ Buju Banton, boom, bye-bye” has execution music on the car stereo, the Jamaican singer’s notorious track as soundtrack to a drive-by. “You pussy niggas miscountin’ all them nine lives” warns anybody who thinks they have chances left. “These guns ain’t whisperin’” dismisses secrecy entirely. Then Push goes somewhere else: “Pick an island, Gilligan/Sit your bitch poolside, sun, turn to cinnamon.” He can vacation, then he can leave. “Drive 2026”—a car from next year, something most people won’t touch. “LV Cash Cow, St. Jude’s cash out” puts luxury and charity donations side by side. His money moves so fast he writes checks to children’s hospitals without thinking about it. None of it redeems anything.

“I can’t even podcast, givin’ all my past out.” Push won’t do the confession circuit, won’t trade old dirt for new engagement. “I don’t do rememberin’, gettin’ money right now”—he’s not here to reflect. “Interview with anybody sittin’ in a glass house”—he only speaks to people as exposed as him. “I’ma pull that mask out, all you niggas mascots.” The mask is threat. The mascots just entertain. “Lookin’ at the difference ‘tween the have and the have-nots.” He names the gap. He stays on his side. Somewhere else, the mess gets made.

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