Album Review: Sock It 2 My Pocket by Rome Streetz
On his way out of Griselda’s orbit and onto Nas’s Mass Appeal, the Queens rapper keeps the loops cold and the drums lean. Rome Streetz raps like every bar is already owed to him.
The catchphrase ad-lib that turned into an expression, sock it to my pocket, is the hustler’s demand after the job is done, and his hands are out to be paid. In this month’s interview with VIBE magazine, the Queens-bred rapper Rome Streetz explained energy is not free—everything he does comes at a cost. He says it the way other men say amen.
When Rome disobeyed his mother and refused to work, she had to make him understand by putting the cuffs on him slowly. This story is hidden in “Yellow Brick Road,” the dirty loop under all of GreyMatter, the new-money paranoia, cutting off everyone who “can’t exist in my axis,” telling one hater that he’d rather have him “stressed out slaving for Uncle Sam in a cubicle” than riding a plane. Mothers keep teaching. Over the clean knock of Pete Rock on “Son of a Gun,” she tells Rome to aim, and he creates his entire identity through it—“Scorpio spinning kinda like the cylinder of my revolver,” Phife Dawg in a Prada parka, worldwide like Starbucks. The brag is dropped once for the memory of his dead friend caused by the wrong pills, pouring Hennessy on the floor.
Malik, the man with the scar on his cheek in “Belt 2 Ass,” was arrested in ‘08 for being crazy on the gate. He came home to find weight—7 Series with PA plates, the nice place in Jamaica Estates, the nightlife that made him very easy to find. Conductor Williams leaves the beat as a loop pressure and negative space, and Rome fills it all with the story. Jealous dudes catch Malik pulling in. He sees the chrome Magnum, recognizes the same dude who cut his face in state, makes sure they ain’t getting anything and takes two shots leaving him alive, never able to walk again, laid out thinking about his son in the daycare. The shooter was a dude Rome knew too, a dude who had been sending him beats for the song they never completed, and he dies in the car crash with his sister on Thanksgiving.
On “Cocaine Coltrane” he cooks the coke on the track, hip-hop for fiends, the Black Mick Jagger finessing the check “like the scammin’ pastor” while Denny LaFlare is locking the beat into the tight loop. Havoc squeezes him into an even tighter pocket on “.22,” and there he makes it autobiographical—grandmothers praying over the grind, Grammer bike sold to Gary, the profits folded into the stash instead of worn. He tightens up for 9th Wonder on the busier “High Speed,” the beat full of accents and cuts, making a crumb from the pie into an estate, meeting God on DMT, recalling the acid drops he used to sell out of a Visine bottle to get his line jumping. With the dark repeating loop Alchemist brings to “Shoot Your Trophies,” Rome turns the thoughts into gold, “the alchemy on some chemist shit,” the dope-dealing world citizen whose cracked iPhone holds CEOs and coke connections, and the price of a verse, per him, now stands at a quarter brick.
Styles P calls his Porsche a kale coupe on “’95 Mega on Shrooms,” rates himself “steep as the Book of Genesis,” and keeps a blade in his New Balance, blunt and close to speech where Rome squeezes syllables into the pocket. Told at the age of twenty-five that he would die, Rome calls himself iconic on “Prada in the Polaroid,” a poster boy, Prada and a Polaroid, and Lloyd Banks replies with his own measured pause, promising to stick around “like it’s tentacles on me” and to slim the hater right up with no Ozempic. The luchador mask comes out on “Marathon or Race,” where Westside Gunn sticks a man up, Rey Mysterio versus the Big Show, shouting Griselda by Fashion Nova, and remembering eating lasagna in cell 055 at USP. V Don creates a darker and cleaner frame for “Taylor Made Wave,” and OX Omni fills it, popping it like the Shower Posse, hailing the biggest Glock like Selassie, wailing like a banshee, while Rome swipes a Maserati with a card and calls his wave tailor-made, sewn.
A woman who Rome once met wants to stay on “Time & Place,” the track he called out to VIBE magazine as a departure, and IDK bounces his syllables around the drum hits where Rome stays tight, riding on fly-and-flashy talk until he puts the ski mask on and shoots the strap to where the hoop dreams used to be. He plays the flower-petal game on “I Don’t Know” with a woman who’ll hide his gun from the police and help him bag up a block, and he drops a chorus any rapper could have written. Sovren slows the drums on “Elevate,” and Rome slows with them, vision like A$AP Yams on acid, the brick in the cabinet in 2016, the court cases replaced with corporations and S-corp funding. At the end, the talk goes back to basics—the Instagram followers he was told to sell something to, the easy job he wanted at eighteen, and the demand itself: “Sock it to my pocket/ Put the money in my hand.” He stayed down and dirty, he tells whoever’s listening.
God visits Rome in his sleep on “Dreamcatcher” and shows him everything he ever wanted, and then asks how hard he will go to get it. “All I do is put pain on the page with the pen,” he admits, kind of like Stephen King, the nightmare in the dreamcatcher, and since no one was coming to save him, he kept two phones—one for the legal work, one to hit up for the slaps. A woman rides along with a hundred M’s hidden in her crotch. The plug waits at a Colombian chicken spot, picked for the crowd that likes to sniff. Rome wakes up from the dream that God gives him and goes there directly, blood, sweat, tears, heart, and soul, the living God, by his own telling, who still meets the plug in person.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Belt 2 Ass,” “.22,” “Shoot Your Trophies”