Album Review: 8 Shots by 38 Spesh
Coke advice turns into a story about his wife driving hours to a prison visit, and the boast and the bill never leave one bar. Method Man, Busta, and a Che Noir featured, all of it stamped “trust.”
It’s a neat arc that’s there for 38 Spesh to market. A Rochester dealer becomes a Rochester landlord; that corner pays off in real estate, and the difficult years are sanded smooth to create a platform for the easy ones. A clean reading would give comfort to everyone involved and would be dishonest. An advice rap (“Be the Best”) is built to be quoted and retorted; it offers: “If you do sell coke, better be the best/Don’t be a small time nigga, better reinvest.” Three bars later, the advice has faded and the verse has landed back in the visiting room with his wife driving in, in a part where: “you can’t cry when you’re handcuffed, who gon’ wipe your eyes?” Boasting and a confession exist side by side on a single verse; the record is better for the complication.
On a beat from Bernard Woodside, the whole credit that Spesh wants is simple. On “Free Game,” he claims that rappers have borrowed from him and “gatekeepers” have tried to sabotage him, reaching for an extreme of not receiving credit by comparing himself to the Black inventor supposedly responsible for the light bulb but absent from history books. An insane ambition to open a verse with, grounded in what’s left of the not-flashy-enough realities: a fifteen-year-old kid wearing a gold necklace, interstate transit by twenty, memorizing exits like any dealer’s creation story. Indignation and kid, back-to-back, though the latter prevails in the argument. A line that this record still comes back to closes it: “A young drug dealer’s dream is to grow to an old executive.”
A question moves through the self-produced “Great Wall”—“Y’all expect me to stay poor”—and his only response is the landlord’s boast that he owns eight doors now, and that other people are now dependent on his property thanks to state laws. Set the business right beside him, signing a year lease in Italy, and you have this whole record in one jump cut. He gives the costing-out verse to an unknown rather than a star, and it pays off in making the surveilled terror sound more like him because it’s a voice we can’t put a face on. Curtis Coke elaborates only on the part that gets him to the landlord position: the plea deal, the product hidden in the floorboards: “When they put the cam under lights, we knew we was the targets.” The doors he owns now and the boards he once hid product beneath came from one stack of wood.
On “Speshal” the figures come cold, the holdings stacked into a portfolio, “real estate, crypto, stocks,” and even the spending gets a footnote, that he “bought things with ETH” off the black market. Money talk this concrete could be read straight off a statement, but it never settles into bragging. “Everything” boils the whole run down to one queasy line about how the cash came clean: “I made the right moves wrongfully.” Dealing detail and clean-money detail still never split into a before and an after. Both stay parked in the same bar, and leaving the timeline messy is where he sounds most like himself.
Che Noir enters “Mental Health” from the far side of the same shut door, and only she could answer his verse the way she does. Spesh opens it stressed and still unsure why, “Maybe it’s the past trauma I need to address,” then names the bind of who there is to tell. “Can’t tell my bitch the reason why I’m sad,” “When everyone in your team competing for a bag.” She answers diagnostic instead of paranoid, money “we just treat like a mask/To hide the trauma and the pain,” landing on the flattest line anyone says here: “When the voices inside your head the only friends that you have.” Two descriptions of one room, the door shut on both of them, no handle on either side.
Half these verses still end on a single dropped word, “trust,” and it pulls double duty every time. Up top it sells as a dealer’s flex, his word is good, his money is real. Underneath it is the thing every verse here proves he can’t afford to extend. A man whose brand is literally Trust Comes First spends twelve tracks on how thin his own supply runs. Over the “Used 2” hook he counts the “false friends” who became “several dead,” then warns “If your bread right, better tread light, they’ll tell the feds.” Same flex, same wound, and on that hook he closes it the only way he ever does: “One gun ain’t enough, gotta use two (trust).”
“Regulatin’ protons, neutrons, and electrons,” Busta Rhymes raps on “Cold War,” sliding into sci-fi before he closes on “Thirty-five years of bodies, but still been killin’ ‘em recently.” Method Man still trades real blows on “The Main Line” and gives as good as he gets. Veterans like these pull their weight, yet his deepest writing comes with the fewest guests in the room. And yet the verse with the most weight is the one he keeps to himself on “Renovations,” counting off “Four kids, three baby mothers, two different marriages,” then the warning he saves for an empty booth, “if you don’t remember death, you gon’ forget to live.” No co-sign went into writing that one down.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Free Game,” “Mental Health,” “Cold War”