Album Review: The Undisputed by Nickelus F
Richmond’s most tenured underground rapper self-produced every beat and wrote every bar. Twenty-six years deep with no label and no features, The Undisputed is the invoice.
A street artist in Richmond, Virginia, once painted a mural of a local rapper on a building in Oregon Hill because he felt the city owed him that much. Nickelus F placed second out of 300 emcees in The Source’s Unsigned Hype battle in 2000, won seven straight Freestyle Fridays on BET’s 106 & Park, ghostwrote for Drake before Drake was Drake, and then spent the next two decades putting out records from Richmond while working as an exterminator for Terminex. He went back to school at VCU with twin daughters and a mortgage, graduated with a Gold Addy for art direction, and now holds a creative director title at Adobe. Somewhere in all of that, he released over twenty mixtapes and eleven studio albums, started his own label, and self-produced nearly everything on his last three records. The Undisputed is what happens when a rapper with that resume decides to strip it all the way down.
The beats here are deliberately unfashionable. Nickelus chops drums that thump like mid-‘90s DJ Premier sessions, snares with weight, kicks that knock without the muddy 808 bloat, loops that leave open pockets for his voice to move. He sews the songs together with film dialogue samples, and they range from funny to strange to ominous: Billy Madison’s “most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard” on “O’Doyle Rules,” a fire-gazing fantasy prompt on “Cauldron Bubbles,” a news clip about untraceable homemade firearms on “Ghost Gun.” The samples give the album a collage quality, like flipping stations on a cathode-ray set while someone raps in the next room. The production never tries to compete with his voice. It stays underneath, gives him a floor, and gets out of the way.
He packs that open space with rhymes until the seams creak. On “Dead Ends,” he jumps from Draymond Green to H-bombs to a poltergeist trapped inside animatronics in four lines, and none of it scatters because his internal rhyme scheme is holding the frame together like rebar. The verse drifts sideways, stacking images until the composite picture is a guy who refuses to stop working double shifts while everyone else chases dead-end trends. Then he spells it out on the hook:
“It’s hard not to follow the crowd, but sometimes that path is just a dead end.”
The hookiest cut here goes to “Soldier of Fortune,” and it might be the best performance. He introduces himself as Big F, the life of the hootenanny, tells other rappers their loofas are nasty, and then runs through Cowboy Bebop references, Key Glock on the South Side, casting God’s rogue angels down. The second verse goes further—he grabs trout barehanded, still eats turkey neck bones and lentil beans after stretching a limousine, and wakes up every morning to the Avenger theme in his head. His growing beard is “a wizard thing.” Nobody in rap right now writes sentences like these. They’re too specific, too odd, too knotted into a life that doesn’t look like anyone else’s to belong to anyone else.
The class detail on The Undisputed is granular and constant. “Snuggle Bear” puts him crawling into a cold bed after a hot shower, staring at an empty fridge with nothing in it—”that shit’ll have you squeezin’ on you like the Snuggle bear.” The man sleeps standing up. His people took a dangerous path to get here; they’re ice road truckers, in his telling. He stacks dollars until his crib looks like Creflo Dollar’s residence and still buys white tees from the hood store. On “Ghost Gun,” he walked into a bank and got told to go to hell, and now money comes through his cell phone daily. He went from bare bones to blowing bags at Saks Fifth, and the people who celebrated when he fell got bailed on.
Chris Claremont’s X-Men were a childhood staple, and Nickelus has been folding Marvel into his rhymes for years. On The Undisputed the references come through like second nature. “Madripoor” is named after the lawless island from Wolverine comics; its intro samples audio from a Marvel property referencing the Black Widow. “Cauldron Bubbles” opens with the Eye of Sauron, wanders into fantasy-realm imagery (mist, chapel roofs, scrolls, talismans, a snaggletooth) and ends with “This is my kingdom.” “Snuggle Bear” namedrops Omega Red’s tentacles as a comparison for his dreads. He pulls up to Comic-Con with a mask and magazines on “O’Doyle Rules,” and magazines doubles as guns and comic books.
The album gets most volatile on “Geiger Counter.” A kid named Rafael was twelve and first to wave a pistol. God forgives, Nickelus doesn’t. Women in his city will “set you up and wet you up”—he dubs it a bridal shower. He fantasizes about diving off the Eiffel Tower to make a splash into history, then in the next breath announces he can’t wait to get rich and laugh at people’s misery. Then he mentions trying to grow spiritually. None of these impulses cancel each other out, and he doesn’t pretend they do. “Water Walker” runs the same frequency. He’s made thousands off digital sales, blows fifty-dollar blunts, staggers out of Denny’s in white Hennessy, and kisses his kids with the same filthy mouth. He’s never been found guilty. He makes history with his spare time, but can’t spare any time.
Both halves of “The Urge” open with a repeated sample asking, “What mysterious force urges me on?” Nickelus answers across two verses that move from God favoring Daniel to surviving ricocheting bullets to his mom’s prayers and running shoes with tightly tied laces to Black cops he views as all racists to Uncle Sam “raw rapin’ my hard wages.” Part II picks up with blessings raining on his crown chakra, skipping across transient markets, calling out rappers dropping “ass juice” while people drink the brown water.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Dead Ends,” “Soldier of Fortune,” “Snuggle Bear”