Album Review: GABO by Primo Profit, RLX & MichaelAngelo
Coke-rap named after a dead novelist, made by two MCs who never mention him once in their verses. The samples do the talking; the bars do the selling.
A Colombian writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1982 told everyone to call him Gabo. The nickname outlived the man and the novels, and now it sits on the cover of a ten-track rap record from Massachusetts. Primo Profit, RLX, and MichaelAngelo are Manteca affiliates, a crew led by CRIMEAPPLE that has been running coke-rap with Caribbean-Latin slang for years. GABO drops García Márquez’s words into the cracks between street-level verses about Pyrex and ZIP codes. But the two MCs never reference the novelist by name in their bars. His voice arrives through Spanish-language samples stitched between songs (most of them in untranslated Spanish), and the listener figures out why he’s there or doesn’t.
MichaelAngelo left construction work to produce full-time, and the percussion on GABO carries that tradesman’s patience. He made every beat here. On “Macondo Marmalade” a low organ figure barely shifts, holding the floor steady enough for Primo and RLX to take turns. The kicks leave gaps between them that the bars have to fill on their own. And when MichaelAngelo drops everything out for a García Márquez sample, the pause between verses is a hard cut, a chapter ending whether the MCs were finished or not.
The record’s regional claim sits right in its second track title. “01841 / 02128” is named for the ZIP codes where RLX and Primo grew up, Lawrence and East Boston. RLX opens his half rapping on flips, exits, property. Between them, a sample announces, “The East Coast jungle—Boston.” Primo’s half goes somewhere more specific (and more uncomfortable). He talks about cocaine processing with the casual expertise of someone who has done it.
“I could even use a microwave
Don’t gotta turn the fucking stove on.”
The track ends with a García Márquez quote from Chronicle of a Death Foretold. “Vete pa’ tu casa y ármate, que te voy a matar.” Go home and arm yourself, I’m going to kill you. I played that back three times. A Colombian novelist threatening murder, right after a verse about microwaving coke.
Primo Profit keeps his word-bank tight across all ten tracks. The Pyrex, the plate of white, the microwave. On “Macondo Marmalade” he raps, “I’m still living off the shit that the Pyrex made/Smoking marmalade, I’m what my father made,” turning the track title into a drug pun and a lineage claim in one breath. On “Blossom” he calls himself Perico, the alias and the self-portrait collapsed into a single word, rapping, “When I ain’t have shit, Perico ain’t never lose his faith.” He asks who the king of Boston is and answers by proxy. “I let my fiends do the talking.” On “Until August” his Spanish mid-verse is first-generation reflex, two languages in one bar, “Conmigo no se crezca/’Cause when I met you we was in la lleca/When you met me I was sellin’ teca.”
RLX writes from a different altitude. Where Primo stays in the kitchen, RLX is already on the plane counting what he stacked. On “Still Tippin,” named after Mike Jones’s 2005 Houston record but built on boom-bap, he delivers the album’s bluntest take on his own position.
“Finally gave ‘em a real topic to talk about
Behind the stage, it was real quiet and awkward now
Without a label, I’m goin’ crazy, don’t box me out.”
Three bars about being independent, delivered flat. On “Of Solitude” he gets autobiographical, rapping, “Aight, I’m from Lawrence/I grew up in Prospect/I do what you not did/I knew I would profit.” Lawrence, Prospect, and then his collaborator’s rap name turned into a pun on ambition—so casual it almost slips past.
On “Infinite Chapters,” a sample bookends the track, singing, “Just like a book up in my shelf, I will keep you for me/Preserve for me and no one else.” The outro carries García Márquez’s reported line about finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Ahora lo único que falta es que esta novela sea mala.” Now the only thing left is for this novel to be bad. It’s a joke. The drums come back and Primo and RLX pick up where they left off, ignoring García Márquez completely. After “Money > Fame,” where Primo raps, “I just want the money, I don’t want the fame,” a different sample lands. “García Márquez didn’t yet know that his nostalgia for this world would be the wellspring of his writing.”
Favorite Track(s): “01841 / 02128,” “Still Tippin,” “Money > Fame”