Album Review: All Eyes On Shiest by Pooh Shiesty
Recording from federal custody ahead of a February trial, Pooh Shiesty makes incarceration his subject and gets more comedy and grief from it than most rappers get from freedom.
Prosecutors contend that in January 2026, a gang of men conducted a robbery and kidnapping of three individuals in a Dallas recording studio. One of them was Gucci Mane, and they compelled him at gunpoint to sign a release from his contract with The New 1017 Records. There are nine defendants in this case. Among them are the Memphis rapper Pooh Shiesty; his father, Lontrell Williams Sr.; and BIG30, a rapper featured in two of these tracks. He was arrested in April and pleaded not guilty. His second album, All Eyes On Shiest, is still being released under 1017 Global, the label founded by Radric Davis, one of the three individuals claimed to have been held hostage in that room.
As the trial date moved from last July because his lawyers requested more time with the discovery, it is now scheduled for February 22, 2027. Shiesty was already thinking about money even before making any. He gets told to either surrender the kid or to catch the ticket himself. Everything else is logistics. “Being rich, part of the plan, I got premade millions,” he raps in “I’m Back,” and the next verse goes about putting a bounty on a young crew member—starting at twenty thousand dollars and aiming to get up to fifty thousand dollars by tomorrow. Jammed 300 Blackout, the truck with bowls which he can’t sell until the deal goes through, and a day at Willett, where he spends the day duct-taping a sixty.
Some details about life in prison pop up in “Last Man Breathin.” He burns his prison uniform when getting out. Six months in isolation teach him patience and show him who’s for real and those only pretending to set him free. They kicked him out of the FCI. What drives him nuts is not the years he already spent there, but the halfway house and the home confinement after. “This is Federal Reality,” he says. The police storm into his cell and search for a phone, believing that they smelled a wick. His homie is released from the seventy-five-year sentence when the two of them become one hundred years old. No one sells him a knife, and he cuts himself a shank from his locker.
He later mentions his late younger brother in about half of a verse. The car that should have turned left, the soul destroyed, still holding on to one of the kid’s poles, still sitting by the window, still putting blood above his sake. “I hate I can’t hug you, lil bro, still dishin’ out slugs for you, though,” he says, and then names the mother whose love outruns everybody else’s. This is the second half of “Reckless Living.” On “I’m Back,” he was sleeping when Nuski got killed, and AP had to wake him up to inform him about that. He missed his big brother’s last breath. Another brother, alive, gives him advice on “Trip”: “You ain’t a robber no more, you famous, stop killin’, but still stay dangerous.” He says he may listen once four more people get spray-painted.
K-Dog pulls the black flag off his head to stop the bleeding. The shot got through his car door on “Reap What You Sow,” and there is blood all over the helicopter. It still hurts his arm in cold weather. Then in the same verse, he hides a knife near his genitals to pass the metal detector, and getting caught sends him six more months in the hole. Shiesty now rides a bulletproof Cybertruck, but he used to ride the MATA bus. The dreads he grew up for a job were immediately cut off afterward. This particular outfit costs him eight thousand, and he has to wear it another day. “Booty Club” is a strip-club record produced by Tay Keith, whose tag is present on this track as well, and it could belong to anybody. “Collecting Tears” begins with a real idea of loving a Micro Drac’ better than a woman, and then the verses become all about Casamigos and Al-Qaeda punchlines.
K Carbon gets the first verse on “New One” and interprets the title as money, men, and wigs, telling a woman that her lace is lifting and advising her to get a new one. She keeps choppers under chandeliers and wants thirty thousand dollars before she agrees to see anybody. Sexyy Red needs a rich man to match her, is too turnt to drink her liquor, and pays the babysitter on her way out the door. BIG30, charged as a co-defendant in the same case, raps on “Still On Timing” and “CMO Freestyle,” and estimates the value of his neck at three hundred bows.
Shiesty considers it hard work to be both a rapper and a killer. “I’m a smacker that be rappin’, not no rapper, don’t confuse it,” he says later. He says that this is his recitation of the information that the feds informed the judge during his sentencing, and advises anyone who did not kill anybody in the past three years to burn the shiesty mask. On “FDO” he says that he raps when he has something to say and not when somebody instructs him to. “MANE.” He knows rats with money. He knows snitches with bodies. “And all them hundreds don’t make you real, nigga, I know rats with some money/And that kill don’t make you gangster, nigga, I know snitches with bodies.” GloRilla takes the other verse, two million dollars made, a limp that she calls pimping, certified before she became platinum. With the denial of his bond and the date of his trial coming up, the rapper from Memphis releases a street rap album while grieving.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Last Man Breathin,” “Reckless Living,” “JPay & CorrLinks”