Album Review: NOT A CHANCE IN HELL by Mozzy & EST Gee
The Sacramento-Louisville alliance doesn’t bother pretending these stories end well. It doesn’t have to.
Sacramento and Louisville are not cities that share a border or a sound, but Mozzy and EST Gee have been circling each other since their 2022 CMG overlap, when both were signed to Yo Gotti’s label and trading guest spots on records like Survivor’s Guilt and Intrusive Thoughts. That shared address didn’t last. NOT A CHANCE IN HELL arrives on EMPIRE, stripped of the major-label machinery, with Forever Rollin behind most of the boards the same way he’s been behind Gee’s Louisville catalog since 2018. These collaborative street rap tapes always pose the same question. Do two guys who talk about the same things actually have different things to say to each other? On NOT A CHANCE IN HELL, they do.
Loyalty is the only thing anyone on this record respects, and disloyalty voids everything else, full stop. Mozzy’s hook on “ROUNDS” tells his younger guys to never put their guns down, and he means it. He opened his duffle bag for a friend’s lawyer when the friend came to him. He kept funding bonds. He heard things on a tapped phone he can’t repeat. EST Gee on the same song did something different with the same principle. He rolled a blunt for somebody after their first kill and let them hit it to calm down. A couple tracks later he’s talking about catching a cross from someone he grew up with, and it still burns. Mozzy is paying for people. Gee is sitting with them after what they’ve done.
“YOU HEAR ME THO” is where Gee gets genuinely disturbing. He cuts off a former friend who did wrong, puts the man on the news, then hugs the man’s mother, kisses his children, and pays for the funeral. Same verse, no pause, no change in his voice. Mozzy on the same track is dealing with something smaller and pettier. People hating since he made a name, buying chains for women to look at, hearing someone got booked for a verse before they actually got arrested. Two guys on the same song, one of them confessing to something monstrous and the other complaining about haters. That’s how the whole tape works and neither of them ever stops to acknowledge it.
Uzzy Snubbz shows up on at least three songs. Mozzy brings him up on “WOULDN’T HOLD YOU UP,” “TURNT,” and “ROUNDS,” and each mention does something different. On “TURNT,” it’s blunt:
“Uzzy Snubbs was next in line, ain’t think he’d be the next to die.”
On “ROUNDS,” Uzzy’s name sits next to Killa Bang’s in a longer roll call of people Mozzy lost from “a place that ain’t as sweet.” Gee carries his own dead. Quan on “TURNT.” The unnamed friends on “NUN LIKE ME” where he holds his wrist to the sky so dead guys can see he’s still lit. None of these people are abstractions. They come with bills. Prison commissary, legal fees, a mortgage that costs thirty thousand. Mozzy on “NUN LIKE ME” is receiving kites from level four, buying phones, funding Apple Pay loans, and says if he could reverse the clock to bring one of them back, he would.
The money and the violence aren’t separate conversations on this record. EST Gee on “NUN LIKE ME” is counting five million in foreign cars at five in the morning and also counting two or three murder situations in two or three years. On “TURNT,” he paid ten thousand to have someone’s head split. Mozzy’s money talk runs different. On “TURNT,” he’s copping drugs with SSI checks. “BUICK TO BENZ,” his solo closer, puts the whole progression in one verse. A 1978 Chevrolet Nova. Rental Acuras from Avis. A real estate portfolio of ten properties, Ace of Spades, bubbly, a friend who had chicken on the table and zips for him when he was broke. Mozzy is the only voice on that song, and it runs long, rattling through Sacramento names and favors owed like he needed a few minutes by himself to get everything out that the collaborative cuts couldn’t hold. It plants him back in Oak Park, on 4th Street, on Pebbles.
BloodHound Q50 gets one verse on “ASIDE,” smoking a pack named after a dead rival and claiming the most hated title in Chicago, and then the tape moves on without absorbing much of his energy. Sacramento and Louisville stay at the center. Gee is rapping from Pebble Creek, Poplar Level, Uptown. Mozzy is in the section, HGM territory, the same spots he’s been posted since 2010. Neither city is a big rap market and neither rapper bothers explaining that. They just name the blocks and the people on them, two cities separated by two thousand miles running the same playbook with different rosters.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “TURNT,” “STILL AIN’T PUT MY PISTOL DOWN,” “NUN LIKE ME”