Album Review: This Is Our Fellowship by Propaganda & ProducerTrentTaylor
Propaganda and a dishonorably discharged beatmaker from Phoenix made a record about what men owe each other. The answer is honesty, and they’re not rationing it.
ProducerTrentTaylor enlisted in the Air Force in 2009, got shipped to Afghanistan in 2012, and made beats for six months on an MPC4000 he ordered off Amazon while servicing A-10 Warthogs between shifts. He got caught smoking weed in his final week—dishonorable discharge, then homeless in the Phoenix area making beat tapes from borrowed couches. A decade later he’d connected with Fashawn for YOU OWE US WITH INTEREST through Mid90s Records, and that record’s guest list included Jason Petty, who rapped under the name Propaganda and had been doing so since joining the Tunnel Rats collective in 2003. Petty grew up as the only Black kid in a Mexican neighborhood in LA, graduated with degrees in illustration and intercultural studies, co-founded two charter schools, toured with De La Soul, and left teaching in 2007 to write full-time. Whatever passed between that 2024 session and This Is Our Fellowship turned a guest-verse acquaintance into a full collaborative album: twelve tracks of vintage gospel loops at prayer-meeting tempos, Propaganda talking to men the way men almost never get talked to.
The title track lays out the premise in a single metaphor. Boys got an eight-count box of crayons; girls got the 64-pack. Of those eight, boys were rewarded for using four. Propaganda ticks off what remained:
“Sad, mad, happy, horny, hungry, you know, primary colors
Nothing analogous or tertiary, no direction
Nothing more than be like Jesus or get this money.”
The metaphor would collapse if it were cute, but Propaganda keeps extending it past the point of comfort (and past the point where the hook should’ve dropped). Some men drowned out the quiet with violent porn, others with the porn of violence. Without direction, they just kept splattering colors until someone said they liked it, and those someones were people who saw them as marks. The payoff is the roll call of what the boys became. Husbands, fathers, friends, felons. He calls it their fellowship.
The Danny A. Thomas-featured “Gas You Up” is probably the song most listeners will carry out of this record. Propaganda spends three verses affirming another man with his whole chest. He ticks off what he sees: a guy waging war with a to-do list, getting angry less, turning a heart of stone into a safe house until his kids are grown. The third verse calls the listener dangerous, and the word sits strangely in a song this gentle, aimed not at fear but at choosing peace. Hip-hop has a deep catalog of songs about respecting your enemies and fearing your friends. An MC looking another man in the eye on wax and saying “Dog, I’m proud of you” is almost structurally alien to the genre, and this one sounds like two guys on a porch after everyone else went home.
Fashawn tears into “Burn It Down” naming the precinct, the Pentagon, the churches, and the school system before closing on Gaza. Propaganda opens his own bars labeling this his “Jesus and the Money Changers era,” backing Molotovs in backpacks, branding a Nazi backhand sanctified testosterone. He puts the question plainly: how can you be an activist if your answer is wanting to run the big house? Set the thing on fire. “Build” answers with the 2025 LA wildfires, when the flames got close and hoods stopped mattering. Gang banging quit, and neighbors cleaned alongside kids carrying water. Propaganda speaks directly to a young person in the second stanza: “What if you ran for office?” You can’t skip to the hammer without the wrecking ball, and you can’t stay at the wrecking ball without eventually picking up a hammer. Not contradictions. Sequence.
The bluntest song here is the one addressed to the institutional church. Propaganda uses “I Didn’t Leave You” to recount getting stuck in theological one-upmanship and having to keep explaining why Black Lives Matter shouldn’t require explaining. A place where a gay daughter is unwelcome? Non-starter. He goes after Trump directly:
“Trump dated the church
Then reprobated the church
And then Trump ate the church
‘Cause Trump hates the church.”
He names Derek Minor and Lecrae at the end, calls them his dogs till the wheels fall off. The verse’s last three lines map where he’s been and where he landed:
“A little more nuance that comes with a little age
A little less ego, a lot less rage
A lot less people, a lot less stage.”
Each line shrinks the frame until what’s left is small enough to actually be honest. The faith didn’t disappear. The stage did.
TrentTaylor’s gospel samples crawl. The drums sit behind the words, patting and shuffling where you’d expect them to knock. You won’t hear the crawl as an asset on first listen—it’s not exactly a pace that begs you to stay. But on a record this dense with language, it turns out to be doing all the heavy lifting. Propaganda’s bars pile details the way a preacher stacks parables, and the production lets every line land before the next one arrives. The beats on “Gas You Up” and “Wish You Well” sound like they were cut from vinyl left in a church basement, dust and all, organ pads decaying at the edges.
Propaganda closes the album by listing his people by first name: his cousin from Southeast DC, the Robles tribe who spoke with a little Spanglish, the Brooman boys, the Zaragoza fools, and more. He runs through the transition to Tunnel Rats being rough. A couple fades, some falling outs. Drift aparts and move aways. The track’s final argument is the record’s best: “You can’t trust a man who can’t name no day ones.” Every verse about broken toolkits and burning the church and building it back ends up here, with Propaganda reciting a roll call of the people who knew him before he was anything.
Favorite Track(s): “Gas You Up,” “Burn It Down,” “I Didn’t Leave You”