Album Review: Selfy by Stu Bangas & A.G.
A Bronx originator’s seventh solo LP gets handed one beatmaker, ten tracks, and zero room for excuses, and the moniker shows up doing its own dishes.
There is a kind of veteran New York rapper who hits his fifty-fifth birthday on the road and still gets introduced from his hometown the way most people give a return address, and Andre Barnes has been that figure since around the year his second Showbiz & A.G. record came out. He turned up on Lord Finesse’s Funky Technician in 1990, joined Diggin’ in the Crates before the crew had its acronym, dropped The Dirty Version in 1999, and has been calling himself Andre the Giant since before half of his current Bandcamp audience was born. Selfy is his seventh solo cover. It is also his first time handing the entire production over to one outside collaborator.
Stu Bangas, the Boston producer behind the entire record, has built his name on drums that carry the bluntness of someone who knows the listener has already pressed skip on something else this morning, and his work for Sean Price, Vinnie Paz, and Ill Bill is the long résumé that backs the assertion. He pulls those drums an inch back from the front here. The ten beats on Selfy let A.G., the rapper, the giant in the mental, work in the foreground without competing for attention. A cracked soul loop sets up “Get It Going.” A heavy boom organizes “Borderline.” Half-remembered chords on “Skywalker” feel borrowed from someone else’s film score, which fits, since the rapper inside them is half-remembering something too.
From the first verse of “Borderline”:
“Surf on turf, she make it feel like a water ride
She my slide, reside on Morningside
You paper thin like Light’s head
Rock of Gibraltar, married the music, nodded the altar.”
The internal-rhyme density gets noticed first. Less obvious is the burying of a Big L line (“paper thin like Light’s head”) inside a punchline at his late friend’s expense, the marriage-to-music vow that returns as a recurring motif on later songs, and the casual reach for “Rock of Gibraltar” as both a metaphor for permanence and a wink his old Diggin’ in the Crates peers would catch instantly. Diamond D’s verse arrives next, brief and pleased to be there. D-Flow’s, which closes the song, threatens to disfigure a grill, names Joe Colombo blowing kush in Dumbo, and brags about flying around the world while a rival sits at the precinct yapping. The crew greeting takes one song, then A.G. is mostly by himself.
A.G. has lived in Tokyo since 2016, and “All These Things All These People” is the record’s clearest acknowledgment of what that displacement has done to his contacts list. The first verse is essentially the contacts list itself, dictated out loud and apparently without much editing. Antho in Athens, Lizzie in Aspen, Bud out in Nebraska, Keisha somewhere in Manhattan, Kim strolling on Hennepin, then Killer Tone catching him on the phone from Baton Rouge, dancing with his gun the way Jamaican shooters do. Winston from Kingston married marijuana and found religion before getting recorded snitching by the people who introduced him to both. The second verse swaps the United States for Berlin, Finland, Denmark, Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris; he has been in every one of those rooms. None of it reads as travel writing, since for a rapper who has been receiving mail in Japan for nearly a decade the geography is just where the postman knows to look. The Bronx address is the older one, and almost the harder one to claim, which is why he keeps claiming it. From his verse on “Suspense”:
“Megatron Bronx, reside in Tokyo
Fuck the bullshit, no rodeo.”
The Andre the Giant moniker—borrowed from the seven-foot-four French Hall of Famer Andre Roussimoff, the shortest-reigning WWE champion in history—has been A.G.’s working name for thirty-six years, and “Skywalker” goes harder on it than almost anything else in his recent catalog. The chorus runs cloud imagery as far as cloud imagery will go:
“I walk the sky
Use the clouds as my steppin’ stone
Universe proud, I made it cry.”
Two verses later, the wrestler shows up by name, “Long as they can hear Andre the Giant when he’s walkin’ on air.” Near the end of the song, A.G. raps about playgrounds filled with used rubbers and crack bottles, the Bronx detail offered with no signaling of how he wants you to feel about it, no commentary attached, the picture sitting where he set it down.
Cory Gunz steps onto “Replicant” with a tongue-twister of a verse that name-checks Warren Beatty in Vegas, hydraulics on a Glock, and a request to be put inside a cage in Wakanda since nobody wants to see him “like a baby near a piranha.” It resets the song’s blood pressure on arrival. On “Creatures,” Sadat X handles the hook in Five Percent vocabulary (a four-bar pronouncement about justice penalizing wrong action and absence of confusion bringing complete satisfaction), and then leaves A.G. to deliver what almost certainly is his most generous verse on the album, an open recollection of fifth-grade betrayal that pivots into the wisdom he gathered from older folks while staying quiet around them. The Bronx becomes a rotten apple he hasn’t stopped describing in three decades. “Born and raised in Bronx County,” he tells you, then “the apple’s so rotten,” then “no stopping,” in that order, in the voice of someone who knows the right sequence of admissions.
A.G.’s argument about real hip-hop runs through more songs than just the title-track at the end. “I call that shit wack and I don’t like it,” he raps on “All These Things All These People” about anyone of his era who didn’t write his own lyrics. On “Creatures” he adds, “no diss to Chris, I’m still number one,” meaning Chris Brown. The closing song samples KRS-One’s “Ova Here” for a hook that scratches that “the real hip-hop is over here.” Whether you want to live within the position the album takes is a question Andre never asks anyone to answer.
Thirty-six years on, the mic is in front of one rapper instead of a crew, by choice. Andre is alone for the final stretch, not from running out of friends to call, but because the cover says Selfy and the title puts the camera on one face. The features cluster early so the closing run can settle. “This hip-hop from the streets to the suburbs,” he raps near the close of the album, after a couple of bars about hors d’oeuvres at a five-star dinner he can now afford. The Bronx is still where the verse comes from when somebody asks him where he’s from, and the answer points down with the thumb.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Creatures,” “Skywalker,” “All These Things All These People”