Album Review: Underdogs Win Eventually by Bizzy Crook
Bizzy Crook gave a decade to other people’s hits while his own family went quiet. In Underdogs Win Eventually, he writes the silence better than the wins.
Leon Thomas’s Mutt LP featured a pen which worked as an opening act in the 2010s. On tours with Wale, Kid Ink, and King Los, the mixtape internet moved on. The Miami writer born Lazaro Camejo (Afro-Cuban and Dominican), Bizzy Crook accumulated his wins in others’ discographies—credits for Giveon and Kehlani, then two Grammys this past February for Leon Thomas records. Underdogs Win Eventually is the debut album of Bizzy Crook on Ty Dolla $ign’s EZMNY Records, his first release in ten years during which he kept the best material for himself. To get to this point, he lost nearly all of the people he used to know, and he mentions them by name and by year.
He buys a Louis purse for his mother in the hook of “Small Circles.” She is bougie now, but a few bars after the beat switch, this generosity crumbles, and he says, “Mama didn’t even believe until I bought her a brand-new car/Then they repo’d that car.” The bank repossessed not only the car but also his mother’s belief, his phrase, and his cousin who never called sits one verse over: “I been grindin’ ten years and now your boy is finally up/And my cousin ain’t even congratulate m,e and it sucks.” He replies to the disappointment by shrinking his environment. On “Locked TF In,” over the stripped drums and heavy bass, the shrinking turns into his daily practice: no one permitted past the door except for him and Pro Tools in the crib. The record warns old friends, “We ain’t really friends, man, don’t ask me where I been.” The gentlest thing he allows himself in the sealed room is a promise, “Gotta make my inner child proud,” one line for the kid before he closes the door.
Zapp’s record featured by 2Pac on “Keep Ya Head Up” lies under “Could Be Worse,” and Bizzy performs “Be Alright” from his point of view check: “You see the wins, but what about the scars underneath?” Leon Thomas takes the second verse of the same song from the other side of the same climb, Colombian maid, five-thousand-dollar bed which he does not sleep in, and reaches the same conclusion, “Where I been ain’t where I’m going/Shit could always be worse, yeah, I know it.” Bizzy is at his ease when sitting next to a singer. On “That’s Love,” with New Orleans bounce underneath, he compresses the entire romance into one instruction, “Baby girl, just get home safe,” care presented as door-to-door logistics, and on “What Do You Like,” with Ty Dolla $ign singing a hook indebted to Da Brat and Tyrese’s “What’chu Like,” he constructs his verses from questions, city or islands, blanco or reposado, “The AP or the Rollie, girl, just pick one,” courtship presented as a survey with known answers.
A threesome at a Four Seasons kicks off the confession on “Find the Feeling,” and the fun disappears line by line. “Tryna find a feeling, I don’t even know what it is/Thought it’d be the floor-to-ceiling windows and new cribs,” he begins, and a few bars later goes another joke with no laughter, “Think my therapist found an infinite money glitch/’Cause I think I got some shit that he could never fix.” He gets a million he wanted and asks for ten more. “I got everything I wanted, and I’m still not done with it,” he says, and never gives an itch closer name than that.
Rick Ross prices himself on “Risky” the way he prices everything, “300K, that’s for the chain I put around my neck.” C Stunna joins him in full Miami shorthand, “From city to city, they know who I am/BTM, Sad Pat, Stunna Man,” and over ACRAZE’s heavy bass and programmed drums Bizzy hardens to follow the flow, confessing, “I don’t know what my sick obsession with revenge is,” then promising loyalty to nothing except to the instrument of the grudge, “Me and my pencil inseparable, baby, you never gon’ take his place.” He puts a date on all this bitterness on “Justified”: “In 2022, that’s when my phone stopped ringing.” Relatives came back to life after he topped the Hot 100, claiming their share in a win which he insists was never theirs, and Benny the Butcher replies from a much harder road, locks picked, bids served, closing his verse on family in hustler’s terms: “Water blow up the Coke, but it ain’t thicker than blood.” The cosign hurts coming from outside of the family.
On “Ready or Not,” it’s your typical “baddie o’clock” anthem that any other Hitmaka club song that any talented Miami rapper could have delivered. “100%” relies more on Leven Kali’s hook than on bars about choosing “nines and up,” and compared to the songs dedicated to his family, it sounds as if he is gossiping.
Before the plaques, it was all about money. On “It’s Never Over,” which is the long thought-provoking song, he recalls that his mother would call him and ask about his overdraft statements, and here goes the decade of financial hardship, failed homeboys whom he could not make into managers, cameraman high off his ass and unable to film, and one line that describes the period in terms of missed investment: “Investors dropped me when I made an album about depression.” He explains everything that happened at the end of the second verse in the details: a party in London for Dre, a familiar face that he met on the Nickelodeon channel, Leon Thomas saying to him, “Rock with me, I got your back,” and the plaques of three-time platinum. And on the third verse, he is sober and thankful for that: “I love being sober, ‘cause every minute sober I know that it’s never over.” Finally, his motivational hook has evidence backing it up.
Many years after Applebee’s days, his ex contacts him in order to get back in touch with him in “Where I Know You From,” but he pretends not to recognize her: “Seein’ old friends, I’m like, ‘Where I know you from?’” When she was with him, she left him for a guy who was sitting at the promoter’s table, and he reminds her about it, saying, “When I was sleeping on my cousin’s couch, you slept on me,” and the couch pun tells the whole story. At the end of the song, there is a sorority skit starring a character called Chanel No BBL, who announces a special party for their underdogs, and it tells much about the invitation. All his forgiveness goes to people like him and not those who slept on him.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Small Circles,” “Justified,” “It’s Never Over”