Album Review: Hustlin Ain’t a Sin by Sha Hef
Home from a five-year sentence, Sha Hef bargains with God across Hustlin Ain’t a Sin over whether the dope game damns him, and makes the best album of his career.
Being in prison for five years allows a guy sufficient time to deeply ponder his own conscience. Returning home, a guy usually would turn the matter of time around the other way, thus proving that he outsmarted the system in his own game. Sha Hef does a stranger thing with it. For the better part of this decade, he has been skiing down this path, often sitting next to Jay Worthy and the LNDN DRGS crew, and it was never grace that he was seeking before. Now he is not able to stop, probing whether a dealer who kept praying the whole time is allowed to get into heaven with everybody else, or if the work that fed him is the only thing that excludes him.
The prayer is not a decoration, and it is always right next to the cage. A child’s bedtime prayer is what he runs before his pistol on “Hustlin Ain’t a Sin,” “Now I lay me down to sleep/Pray the Lord that pole I keep,” and he straight away asks if there’s a heaven for thugs and he would rather choose twelve jurors than six pallbearers. “The Pinnacle” starts with him fresh out the can, naming the charge plainly, five years for gun possession and trafficking, and the betrayal is heavier than the time: “Niggas really left me for dead, and I ain’t attacking them/But I can’t take the knife out my back and just give it back to ‘em.” “Adding Up” reduces the bid to one detail, “twenty-three and one,” twenty-three hours in a box and one out.
The darkness would take over quickly if Sha Hef were not this funny. “I feel like Pat Mahomes,” he raps on “Pat Mahomes, “ which is a metaphor for a two-person hand-to-hand sale of the whole deal folded into one line. On “LIDS,” he brags, “I’m collecting all these hats, niggas think I work at Lids,” a body count in disguise, hats for heads. He builds whole verses out of these turns. “Adding Up” piles a run of them, from illustration to inspiration, to vindication, the rhymes stacking -ation on -ation. The jokes flounder when there is no substance underneath. “Respectfully” refutes a verse on lobster and shrimp and chartered flights, and the punchlines hunt for the same targets long after they’ve finished saying anything about him.
Considering the number of jots a rapper can cram into a bar through his talent, the rapper needs the ground under him to be stable, which is the same element of security that the producers provide him. On “Rob Who Take What,” he name-checks the source with the line, “Frost sent me this beat, and then I went and cut the stove on,” putting Harry Fraud in the same breath as cooking. Fraud is responsible for that one in addition to “Gotti” and “Elephant Man,” which all begin with the “La música de Harry Fraud” tag. He also steers clear of Sha Hef’s loops, allowing him the space he needs. Grimm Doza, Nicholas Craven, and 183rd dominate most of what is left, and none of them overcrowd him. Even his most loaded line, “Me, my double cup, and a zip the holy trinity,” comes in clearly without anything fighting for space.
Ab-Soul appears on the “Elephant Man” track like he is talking himself into the “cosmos,” “Restoring order out of chaos,” as he quotes, “Was an inch away from selling yola ’til I became yola.” Thus, the dealer is reimagined as a law of the universe. On “Fireflies,” Jay Worthy does the totally different thing, pulling the story back to one corner. He reminisces the years before the bid, “I knew my brother Sha Hef when they was still sipping Act’ on two-fifth and seventh Ave, twenty-five for an ounce,” and then he transfers it to now, “Oak, Now I own a brand-new house, steak dinners, no carryout.” That verse is the one which only puts Sha Hef in somebody else’s memory and does for him what he cannot do for himself. ANKHLEJOHN, on “Cocaine Choir,” takes the church bait and runs all the way to the altar with it, “You can’t bring a U-Haul behind the hearse, I left it all here,” making a literal of the trap-God sermon which Sha Hef only flirts with.
These lines, which are often read as feminist, are actually templates for women to be used and thrown away; sometimes the rapper goes too far with it. In the line from “Fireflies,” “Told her open her mouth, don’t got time for abortions,” which is the hook, Jay Worthy gives his warning right after saying, “Dying over a bitch will get you killed.” Also, Sha Hef appears to be totally oblivious to the antagonism between these two lines. The same mouth that pleads to heaven for a sign is also the mouth of a woman who just wants cash on “Respectfully,” “She say she do anything I want, but I just want cash,” and he sees it as a source of humor.
In the song “Gotti,” the mode of boasting now is read differently. The hook “Monday I’m all alone... And it’s a blue Monday” really points out that he is the only one here, and on the next hearing, he kills the time the only way he knows: “Take five hundred blue strips and count ‘em up just for the fuck of it.” What he says shows that he has a cash counter that is used a lot and is again on the “LIDS.” Also, he has a fridge stuffed with cash, which has no other space to store it in. All that counting looks just like a man in a cell marking off the days of his time, and Sha Hef seems to understand it. The boasting was never really about the money; in fact, it was about keeping his hands occupied while he was waiting to get the news about his place in heaven.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Hustlin Ain’t a Sin,” “Cocaine Choir,” “No Discussion”