Album Review: Leopard Eats Face by Ras Kass
Thirty years deep with no softening and no apologies, the Carson MC heaps grievances, gunplay, and geopolitical asides into a record that dares you to separate the fury from the footnotes.
A record that opens with an accusation and barely pauses for breath across seventeen songs is either going to reward your attention or punish it. Leopard Eats Face, the latest from Carson, California’s most stubbornly prolific lyricist Ras Kass, does both, sometimes within the same verse. The album draws its title from the internet-age shorthand for predictable blowback. You feed the leopard, you applaud the leopard, and when the leopard rips your face off, nobody should weep. That premise gets applied, bar by bar, to MAGA voters who catch racial slurs from the movement they championed, to hoods glamorizing Goodfellas while forgetting that Henry Hill ends up in suburban witness protection, to rappers who chased drill clout and then copped pleas with the district attorney. On the title cut, he connects these betrayals with the matter-of-fact irritation of a man reading a zoo warning sign to tourists who keep leaning over the railing. The album’s first minutes set a pace closer to a lecture hall than a cipher, and that tonal gamble defines everything that follows.
The political material on Leopard Eats Face never drifts toward vague protest language. When Ras accuses Post Malone of being “a colonizer” and calls the Alchemist “a fucking liar,” because of the “We Gonna Make It” beat fiasco, they’re specific charges about white proximity to Black creative spaces, and he pairs them immediately with the accusation that Black audiences “like what rich people tell you to.” On “Flava Flav Dance,” the angle tilts from culture theft to gun legislation. He names red states refusing to pass laws, stray bullets “even where the kids playing,” and rappers getting robbed backstage as parallel versions of the same American indifference. The Tory Lanez-Megan Thee Stallion reference sits between a passage about school shootings and a clinical description of what a bullet does inside a body, “internal nervous damage, had his body doing flinches.” That proximity is deliberate. He refuses to let gun violence stay sorted into neat categories of entertainment, politics, or tragedy, and the song’s hook, which names the involuntary spasm of a person who just got shot after a Flavor Flav clock-dance, weaponizes absurdity in a way that’s difficult to laugh off.
The guest list mostly sharpens the record. Inspectah Deck and the Coast Contra crew arrive on “I Got That” over a Da Beatminerz loop that bangs like 1997 B-boy equipment, and their verses sharpen the competitive axis without adding ideology. Deck’s couplet about having “a whole lot to say, not a whole lot of time” turns the posse cut into a ticking-clock exercise, four writers sprinting through their best bars before the tape runs out. Smif-n-Wessun on “42” wrench the energy eastward, with Tek and Steele growling through a Brooklyn-LA alliance anchored by the Jackie Robinson numerology of the title. Ras pitches it as overdue coalition building, and the Bucktown duo match him line for line with prison-yard snarls and Nino Brown callbacks. Tray Deee’s contribution to “Contraband” inverts the guest dynamic entirely. Where the New York features tighten the writing, Tray Deee loosens it into an almost documentary monologue about Level 4 prison yards, Swahili spoken on the tier, and Green Dot payments smuggled through the library. That verse hauls the weight of lived time in a way none of Ras’s own boasts about the CDC general population quite replicate.
The city-grievance material could sink a weaker record, but Ras makes it specific enough to sting. “Don’t Deserve Me” is a breakup song addressed to Los Angeles, and the accusations pile up with a jilted lover’s precision. KDAY won’t spin his records, and his hometown promoted imitators over him. He was “too east to be West Coast, so West I’m not East, too gangsta to be underground, too hip-hop to be street.” That taxonomy of rejection sticks because he immediately undercuts his own martyrdom by comparing himself to Brooklyn, not appreciating Biggie. The grandiosity and the insecurity sit together, uncorrected. When he threatens to move east and date a woman who “at least appreciates my shit,” the metaphor collapses into plain hurt. On “Where the Fu-Schnickens @?” the same wound gets dressed in different clothes. He recruits Chip Fu for a collaboration that is a eulogy for mid-‘90s hip-hop infrastructure. He traces the timeline from The Box giving regional rappers national reach to Bob Johnson selling BET to Viacom, then to the sound getting “simplified” and the messages getting stripped. The claim isn’t wrong, and neither is the bitterness, but Ras keeps circling his own overlooked status within that history until the two arguments fuse and you can’t tell if he’s mourning a culture or a career.
Ab-Soul’s appearance on “Latency” gives the album its strangest and most rewarding stretch. Both writers seem to be rapping from somewhere between a conspiracy theory and a prayer. Ab-Soul claims a “doctorate in Nigganometry” and drops Annunaki references alongside his “Black lipped pastor” persona, and Ras matches him with a verse that vaults from pistol-whipping to extracting dinosaurs to reverse cowgirl in the span of eight bars. The chaos is intentional. Neither MC bothers to explain the leaps, and the track’s hook, “Sorry you had to wait, felt I left you far behind,” holds a double meaning about both the gap between albums and the cognitive distance required to follow either of them. When Ras returns for his closing verse and declares himself “over-qualified” and owed respect, the frustration hits differently after Ab-Soul’s fever-dream cameo, because now you’ve heard two minds working at a speed that mainstream rap simply doesn’t reward.
For all its talk-heavy bravado, the album’s most grounded moment belongs to Treach and Wais P on “Scar Tissue.” Ras opens with a bar-by-bar description of his own writing process, “write a dope bar, then write another bar, make sure it go hard, then write fourteen more,” and it sounds less like a boast and more like a man describing manual labor. Treach, arriving mid-song with the manic cadence that made Naughty By Nature impossible to ignore in 1991, tears through his verse calling himself “a critic cruncher” who keeps “a fully loaded Roscoe.” Wais P follows by admitting the game stole his view, then threatening to dump on opponents until their souls separate. The three veterans crowd the same space with no wasted courtesy, and the Amadeus beat gives them enough room to collide without stepping on each other. “Scar Tissue” runs on a plain idea. War stories cost something, and the proof is permanent.
These songs sit in the album’s most volatile territory. Both songs contain lines engineered to startle. On “Set This Off,” which rides a Fredro Starr production alongside Onyx’s returning menace, Ras proposes sneaking a Draco into the Grammys, shooting back at school shootings, and screaming fire in a movie theater, all within the same sixteen bars. These are fantasy provocations stacked so high they buckle under their own weight, and that seems to be the point. “Fun & Games” swaps the revolutionary posture for financial aggression. He imagines himself touching down like a superhero after jumping off the roof of the New York Stock Exchange, one knee to the concrete, then calls out rappers who want Kendrick Lamar money for B-Rabbit effort. The record’s villain keeps shifting, corporate America, lazy MCs, himself, and the instability is part of the argument. If consequences are the only truth, then everybody’s a target.
Two songs disrupt the album’s combative momentum in ways that matter. “Clap Cheeks,” featuring J Stalin over Mekanix production, is straightforwardly a sex record, the kind Ras references when he insists the album is “well-rounded.” It exists at a comic remove from the political fury, and J Stalin’s verse, which includes a request that his date not pass gas on their first encounter, tilts the whole thing into slapstick. The interlude “Be Bold” operates on a similar frequency, with Ras rattling off punchlines about lesbians and pregnancy at a speed that suggests he’s amusing himself between the heavier lifts. Neither track undermines the record’s seriousness, but they reveal the personality behind the lecture, a man who can’t resist a dirty joke even when the building’s on fire. “Miss Me Yet?” with Timothy Bloom toggles between those registers most nimbly. Ras traces his lineage through “mitochondrial DNA, maiden name Baptiste,” brags about making an ex’s separated husband FaceTime during a sex act, and then settles on the genuinely mournful admission that his hometown radio, KDAY, still won’t spin his music. The song asks whether anyone misses him while methodically proving that he never stopped swinging.
The biggest question Leopard Eats Face raises is whether the consequence argument, don’t act surprised when what you built turns on you, actually holds across an hour. On the title track, it’s sharp. On “Flava Flav Dance,” it’s harrowing. On “Don’t Deserve Me” and “Where the Fu-Schnickens @?” it curdles into something more personal and less universal, the leopard gnawing at Ras Kass’s own career while he insists he warned everyone. The record is strongest when the blame points outward with receipts and weakest when it turns inward with self-pity, and the line between the two keeps blurring. That blurring might be the most honest thing about it.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Latency,” “Scar Tissue,” “Flava Flav Dance”