Album Review: NEVER SAY DIE by PFG
J. Cole went home to Fayetteville to produce PFG’s NEVER SAY DIE, and the Sheltuh rapper fills his minimal, bass-heavy beats with the hardest, most lived-in street rap of Cole’s producing life.
Fayetteville, North Carolina, is a soldier town, hemmed in around Fort Bragg and dubbed Fayettenam by the natives. Rap in that city has always come out of one house. Bomm Sheltuh ran teenage J. Cole through his first recording sessions before he made that city his nam,e and Nerv kept The Sheltuh rolling in his wake, and the frontman of that group goes by PFG, Prettyface Gangsta, a rapper who tags himself No Face right along with his own name. Cole came home to produce his NEVER SAY DIE and kept the production slim and mean, open air where a busy producer might pile melody. PFG eats up that space.
A heavy soul sample loops around a head nod pocket on “Mr. Biggs” as PFG delivers a conversational cadence on trapping out the back door, bragging, “This that flow that Pac show.” Cole drops “End of the Day” knocks rather than swings, kick and backbeat underneath a hustler’s sermon on stacking chips and striking out on your own to avoid minimum wage work, with “Bonita Applebum” interpolated into a bridge where PFG begs a plug for half a kilo on consignment, ski mask as the backup plan. PFG lays out the terms himself: “Cole made the beat so I could smoke this bitch.” Then he spends his verse doing just that.
PFG watched a man get killed over cigarettes when he was nine years old. “When he become dead, I become alive,” he raps on “In Rotation Left,” locates the murder precisely, on the Merc, while he was living in Tiffany Pines, and takes the only message the moment taught him, which is that time is short and every quarter and dime matters. Cole serves the hook around him, blunt to the left hand, life always running clockwise, and by the second verse, PFG is out shopping weight from plugs who don’t speak English, one man, one nightmare like Jason. There is death coming on “Murk Mob” too. Over the busiest, most aggressive drums Cole gives him anywhere, PFG drives down Mercerson Road planning his next key and writes the coldest line on NEVER SAY DIE: “Around this time next year, niggas gonna wanna kill me.” Then he loads four bricks and a roadmap into the whip and promises to feed the projects when he gets back.
Cole raps here too, and he sounds looser than he has on his own songs in years. His “Mighty Mouse” intro admits he doesn’t know what he’s about to say, then he says plenty, dogs convalescing through tears and blood and sweat, a whole stash parked with the white boys at Goldman Sachs when the economy crashed. PFG picks the money theme up on the go, back on his stash, weighing O’s, taking Cash App or Venmo for a quarter mil off of one rental. They are the furthest apart on “Whole House,” where Cole hawks ice cream for the low riders and a million off of dope fiends, then spends his second verse rapping from the other side of fame, jersey retired in the rafters, silhouette too iconic to hide, living like a parade, smiling and waving. PFG responds from street level, Cesar Blitz shot through the tint, P’s in the duffel bag, leaning when he drinks.
PFG opens “Handguns & Hang Gliders” with a dead rapper in the trunk and the question, “Son, what’s it gonna be?” Cole lets air in before the drums hit, and PFG never expands the scenario past that car. The coroner looks at the body and calls it a semi. PFG grins about a surefire investment.
Over the mournful loop of “Twins Forever,” slow and heavy and closer to a grief album than a love song, PFG asks the woman wanting to marry him if she really would write him if he went to jail, then pledges twinship over the mantra, “I get money.” On the remix, he raps the first verse back word for word and hands the empty spaces over to Cole, who pegs the ride-or-die to his own name, “Aim at whoever threat Jermaine and dump,” before easing into getting old with his day one, memes and basketball and the boat pointing to Brazil. Cole explains the remix. PFG’s contribution is the verse from the beginning, untouched, his only shortcut.
The entire mob is present in “910 We Get Active,” a chant which Cole maintains consistently over drum beats tailored for a choir, and PFG delivers their pledges, smoke to avoid, a vow with the mob, a 5K coat, before ceding the line which reveals the reason for all the shopping: “I cop Designer ‘cause I got trauma from all the time I hopped the fence.” One line later, he reveals that he is not rich but not poor either. In a city where, according to him, even a coward has guts, the Moncler is armor purchased from retail stores, evidence that he made it over the fence and returned with money to spend.
Standout (★★★★½)
Favorite Track(s): “In Rotation Left,” “Whole House,” “Murk Mob,” “Twins Forever”