Album Review: Football by Monday Night & Evidence
Monday Night raps like he can’t slow down. Over Evidence’s loops, the losses he speeds past carry Football further than any boast.
A rapper this prolific never gets to sit still. The early run came in a sprint, the 2018 EP Charles Zarkley, the next year’s ScoMaha mixtape, a collaborative tape with Big Kahuna OG, then more, the releases stacking faster than the cosigns from Earl Sweatshirt and the Alchemist that eventually arrived. Monday Night, of the Richmond crew Scheme Team and the Mutant Academy circle Fly Anakin co-founded, writes like someone who has already booked the next session before this one wraps. On Football, ten tracks built entirely from the sample-based loops of Los Angeles producer Evidence, who never once picks up the mic, the hurry stops being a release schedule and turns into a style. He packs each bar past the point where the words stay easy to follow, and the rapping runs fastest wherever the feeling underneath it gets heaviest.
The writing comes sideways, in clusters of internal rhyme that switch subject mid-breath. “Street Racing” runs football through the whole verse, calling audibles and a Hail Mary he could never fail, and threads the game into the same restlessness that keeps him cutting records: “I’m shoppin’ every week and you stop, every week in a roster swap.” He puts himself above the field, floating in the air over a rival’s head, writing the man off as not even a starter on Carter’s team. “Overdrive” pulls up to Venice with a couple minutes to spare and keeps stacking, “flow is omnipotent,” “flyer than Icarus, then sit you in fire,” until the height of the boasting reads as motion for its own sake. The second verse drops the act. “For all them years and tears I over-cried to a cobra’s eyes,” he raps, then shuts the door on anyone trying to take his measure: “You can’t research me/I’m an anomaly.”
Money shows up constantly and almost never as a flex. On “Akinyele,” a spoken voice sets the terms before the verse starts: “Nobody ask you where you got your dollar, they ask you do you have it?” Then Monday Night’s girl asks if he’s coming home, he says he wants the house poppin’ and to live large, and the next line pulls the floor out: “Remember times when I would live in cars, I sleep alone.” The hunger has a target, too, which is being nobody. He delivers a stone-cold read to the people who told him he would never make it: “I’ll be the first to tell you how your dreams always seem to be a failure to the niggas with no alias.” “You Name It” opens with him spending somebody’s deposit and writing off a rival’s bars as slightly old and sloppy, and when Domo Genesis shows up he matches him bar for bar, calling the two of them the mob and the next chapter of Tha Carter series, signing off with “I’m in a league you niggas ain’t involved with.” On both songs the cash is rent, a deposit, a dollar somebody keeps asking after, with the fear of being a man with no alias running under all of it.
On “Derryclare,” the menace shows its nerves. Fly Anakin takes the first verse in full block-politics mode, feeding people who don’t even like him and recounting a stickup in flat past tense: “We was outside, you left with 12 and niggas took your cake/But that was good on my block, you had to leave with round eight.” Monday Night’s verse reads a man before the man can open his mouth: “I already know your heart/I know your traits like sharks know the dark.” He claims a long acquaintance with the worst of it, “before I knew I was a god, I already knew Satan,” and then the bravado thins. He does not want fame to steer him off from Gary, does not want to cry like Mary. “Get raided once the sun down,” he raps, then in the next breath: “I’m dangerous in the clutch now.”
A couple of these stall out. “Doubletree” parks in a hotel suite and stays there, ashing on the drapes, sizing up a threesome, dragging through a stretch about some rapper who knew him before he was anybody, and the writing flattens into pure swagger. “Nina Sky” runs a similar lane, all blood pressure rising and back shots for exercise, until a single turn near the end finally means something: “First time she held me down was the Nina Sky/If I hit her, she’ll be down, I ain’t even try.” When Monday Night is only flexing, the density that makes him thrilling elsewhere just spins.
Pointed at the work itself, the velocity sharpens. “1st & 3rd” has him reading a liar before hearing the man out and keeping his savings where he can watch them: “Wells Fargo under my mattress while my interest rise.” The second verse turns toward something like a calling, “I’m the one, I ain’t always believe it,” he admits, before talking about gospels for nonbelievers and using rhymes as a vessel to teach. Then the football imagery closes it out, niggas on first and third on the drive home, income tax handled, the only appropriate verb servin’.
The grief is what stays, and it never gets a song to itself. On “Muscle Memory,” a text from his big cousin cuts in mid-flex, “I knew it was something heavy,” and then, dropped in plain: “RIP Aunt Elsie.” He thinks about his moms whenever he’s tested, cops to a fake relationship with God that he figures helped him anyway, and only near the end says where his head has been the whole time: “I was thinking about my Aunt Elsie this whole time/My eyes felt pressure, so I rode blind.” The song’s last words, “I show up for you like my auntie/I really know my role,” are the closest he comes to saying it straight. “Lighthouse” handles a different loss the same way, an inheritance from his pops he already spent, folded into a verse about wanting a sunroof and a hook about swapping his life out for one that rhymes. Both times the loss comes up mid-verse and is a bar or two before he’s gone to something else, and he can’t become weighed down by it. The word is that he raps fast because he has to, so that he can’t keep going over and over again in the rooms, these two songs keep passing. When he does slow down, however, it’s just straight devastation.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Lighthouse,” “Muscle Memory,” “1st & 3rd”