Album Review: What Would Harley Race Do? by Action Figure 973 & Artificer
An underground-rap concept record where a dead NWA champion does half the emotional work, and the Belleville MC building around that voice has the ear to match.
Kevin Nash tells a story, halfway through track two, about an armory gig in Washington, D.C. He and Harley Race are driving back from it, get turned around, wind up in the hood, and Race, reigning NWA champion and somewhere in his sixties, takes a one-way street the wrong way at 90 miles an hour past a cop. Nash’s delivery comes out drier than the joke deserves: he says flatly he’s not staying in that car. The anecdote is not nothing. Listen to where it sits, and you’ve already got the operating metaphor for the whole album. Belleville, New Jersey MC and producer Action Figure 973, who records under a handful of names and goes mainly by Aklo, has built his third album around the idea that an MC in 2026 can operate on Race’s temperament, head down, going the wrong way on purpose, unbothered by the lights, and that the attitude is rarer than a skill set. What Would Harley Race Do?, produced entirely by Artificer and out through Martin Camarda’s Bars Over B.S. label, is Aklo trying to prove he inherited the old man’s stubbornness.
Aklo’s second verse on “Puerto Rican Pyramids” enters sideways, at “sloppy top, back to back sold out drops,” and by the seventh bar he’s ricocheted through knots, wrist locks, Faith Evans apologizing to Tupac, a Puerto Rican pyramid rising into the sky, Babe Ruth’s Dominican heritage, a Spanish-language Trump insult, and an ancestral warning that “as long as I’m around, you niggas will never have the ill run again.” His flows sprint where others would coil. The lines accumulate outward from a boast into an ancestral claim without slowing the cadence. Artificer pins him inside a narrow lane of dusty sample chops and shuffled drums pitched low, the horns mixed so Aklo’s voice carries above them like a heat signature. Aklo’s stamina does the work instead, thirty-odd bars a track with almost no breath between them.
Harley Race has been dead since 2019. His archival audio runs through much of *What Would Harley Race Do?*, and one clip does real damage to the track around it. At the end of “Harley Warned Bruiser About Puerto Rico,” after Aklo’s verses have wrapped, Race is given the last minute of the track, telling a story we’ve apparently heard him tell before: he warned Bruiser Brody (legal name Frank Goodish) not to go to Puerto Rico and make demands, since he wouldn’t come back alive. (Brody was stabbed to death in a San Juan dressing room in July 1988.) Aklo’s chorus three minutes earlier, “I’m in Puerto Rico plotting backlash like Bad Bunny,” had registered as a Shane McMahon-style stunt. Once Race stops talking, that stunt is nested inside a warning somebody who trusted Race ignored and died for.
Aklo’s non-rasslin’ references check current almost everywhere, which is rarer than it should be in concept rap this late in the cycle. On “Puerto Rican Pyramids,” Aklo writes, “Wrote this the day Hogan died and prayed he didn’t get into Heaven,” and Hogan died on a Thursday morning last summer, which plants the bar inside a news cycle Aklo was actively writing from. “Bred 11’s” slips in a Camp Mystic reference (the Texas flash flood that killed twenty-seven at a girls’ camp last July), folded into a throwaway wordplay about traffic. “Harley Warned Bruiser” invokes Rashad Jackson’s son by way of the Syko Stu squared-circle death, the kind of obituary you only name if Cagematch is in your daily tabs. Elsewhere Selena earns a bar, Obie Trice cops one, Danny Ainge dunks on Drexler, Necro Butcher becomes a dead-body-disposal reference, and the Ohio Players sit in the verse as a brag about range.
Brother Tom Sos, the only non-archival guest on the tape, turns up on “WWF Ice Cream Bars” with a verse about a sibling he lost. “My brother died, we went to war every day to even score,” he raps, before sliding into the “let the bodies hit the floor” line from the Drowning Pool song. It’s the most honest second on the album. Aklo’s answer piles a Yokozuna uranage on top of a Bobo Brazil favela brag on top of an Insane Clown Posse persistence reference, and at the dead center of the verse lands: “Work ethic that Harley Race instilled.” Going from a lost sibling to a long-gone wrestler in sixteen bars should be unwatchable. It isn’t. By the ninth track Aklo has made Race a grief figure too, not just a work-ethic one, and the jump from mourning Tom Sos’s brother to naming Race as an ethic lands on that prepared ground.
The late-sequence tracks get weaker returns on the same idea. On “Blame Game,” the hook credits his labelmate Ty Farris and his boss Martin Camarda for his success, but the verses underneath don’t track that hook anywhere. They’re Triple H brags, Teddy Long shouts, a line about Vince Russo, none of it specifically about Farris or Camarda. “Harley Pulling a Gun on Hogan” is worse on paper and sharper in practice: the title is built around an alleged backstage incident Race is supposed to have pulled during Hogan’s rise, and Aklo leans on that title without doing the work of telling you what the gun means to him specifically. Race’s archival audio has already supplied the stakes elsewhere.
Aklo buries the key bar of the record in a throwaway spot. Eight bars into the second verse of “Bred 11’s,” right between a vinyl-catalog arch and a Camp Mystic joke: “Knowing how to move critical, I was the only rapper Harvey Race listened to.” The *Harvey* in the lyric sheet is either a mix-engineer typo or something Aklo decided to keep. Whichever it is, he doesn’t dwell on it. The bar passes. Race is given the last minute of the record, audio from an early-eighties conversation with interviewer Gordon Solie. He talks about training Dusty Rhodes, then having to shift mid-title run to face Ric Flair, six championship reigns by then, getting beaten in Japan one week and winning the rematch the next. His last words on the tape are, “The big seven is up.” Race went on to win an eighth NWA title after that audio was recorded. He was already planning it out loud.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Tracks: “Puerto Rican Pyramids,” “What Would Harley Race Do?,” “Harley Warned Bruiser About Puerto Rico”