Album Review: From Baton Rouge to Babylon by Ronday & Wino Willy
Wino Willy and Baton Rouge rapper Ronday bend Southern theology over Marcberg-school loops.
From afar, a problem with costumes; up close, music. A rapper from Baton Rouge whose range stretches from Huey P. Newton to Pimp C and Kevin Gates, and to the Baton Rouge corner store, is thrown into the world of Wino Willy. He gives you a regular recurrence; it’s sampled and groovy. He does tracks with Mach-Hommy, Your Old Droog, and Tha God Fahim. The dress that looked like it was borrowed now fits perfectly, and by track three, we can rest easy that a producer from New Jersey through New Orleans understands the Southern canon. “Back from the West” brings everything back to a trudge, and the late-night jazz aesthetic does the rest. “I’m strapped from the toe to chest with more respect for the vision” comes from Ronday, and the beat is a direct lift from a Conductor Williams sketch, and the verse shows us that he was, in fact, waiting for those loops for the rest of his entire life.
At the end of Ottoman Park, he begins the verse breaks while talking to no one during “SHIVA.” He says, “I ended up walking to Ottoman Park from somewhere uptown,” and after a pause, says, “This grass is moving.” The jazz-tinged Wino Willy hovers layered throughout, while Ronday’s delivery is shrewd and more animated. Using rapid-fire pocket changes to match the shifting energy of the track, maintaining a deeply reflective and intense tone.
Who else is reaching for Huey P. Newton and Pharaoh’s plague to silicon and Aviana’s hustle on the corner across from Club Eure within the same verse? Across these eleven cuts, Ronday is one private theology, where Black Panther canon meets gospel altar imagery meets Louisiana street talk. The “Propane, even if I don’t break through, my crew gon’ light the fuse to breach the walls of Babylon” arrives between a Newton allusion and a sermonic Ephesians fragment. His delivery sits low and conversational, the kinship Big K.R.I.T. used to handle Houston-by-way-of-Mississippi truisms. Cypress trees catch fire on “COLLEGE DRIVE.” Ayoola Davis surfaces on “SINCE PLYMOUTH.”
The album’s worst miscalculation lands at “Jackals in the Swamp,” a skit regarding a homecoming-weekend story about pulling up at Canes, eating mushrooms, and watching the river road swamp move. “Bitch, I could’ve sworn I seen jackals in the swamp, nigga,” one voice half-laughs. As oral storytelling it has texture; as a track positioned right after “AFTERLIFE AWAITS,” the project’s most propulsive cut, it kills the album’s pacing dead. “WELL WISHES” starts cold trying to recover.
Ronday writes best inside Wino Willy’s tighter pocket arrangements, though he loses ground when the loop strips out. On “WELL WISHES” the beat narrows to melancholic guitar plucks and a slow drum roll, and Ole Man Stogie arrives with the album’s most vulnerable bars: “Crack my limbs, lost myself, then lost my Mrs/Should I lose another thing, I ain’t gon’ make it to Christmas.” Stogie takes that round. Ronday’s own verse on the same song, with its trade-with-the-devil math about needing solid-gold dimes, lives lower than the older voice’s exhaustion. Joe Scott runs the same play on “SOUTHERN SOLDIER,” where his faster, jagged flow gets cut through the crashing rhythm section in a way Ronday’s smoother delivery does not.
Across Wino Willy’s recent work with Mach-Hommy and Your Old Droog, drums sit absent and loops sit denuded, where post-Marcberg underground rap runs through Conductor Williams and Camoflauge Monk and Denny LaFlare. Like Big K.R.I.T. before him, Ronday lives in regional Southern detail and big-room spiritual writing, where Curren$y and Kevin Gates also draw breath. The two lineages rarely meet. Curren$y does not turn up on a Camoflauge Monk beat. A Mach-Hommy beat does not usually find a rapper quoting Huey P. Newton over it.
Bright Rhodes notes get pushed forward on “COLLEGE DRIVE,” Wino Willy at his cleanest, a head-nodding pocket where a steady bass groove and a vocal melody layer get floated in by Matt Paige. Inside that brightness Ronday writes his strongest verse on the project. “I blush at my reflection as you stretch ‘cross the flesh of the Escalade,” he raps, and a few bars later, “I’m from Baton Rouge, the sisters out your safe play with your mama.” His Escalade bar reads as flex-as-confession. His Baton Rouge bar reads as geographic warning. Like Boldy James inside Alchemist’s frames, Ronday rides the crevices in a skeletal arrangement and packs them with proper nouns—Club Eure, Gardere, the apartment they turned into a hot mess on a Sunday.
Boom-bap bulges under Wakai’s verse to close the project, his voice held a half-octave under Ronday’s. “We had no peace on the land since Plymouth/I got no plans to play with you,” he raps as Wino Willy lets the loop swell and hold a measure longer than expected, easing the album out by an extra eight bars. Call it Bayou Marcberg.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Back from the West,” “AFTERLIFE AWAITS,” “SINCE PLYMOUTH”