Album Review: Who Coppin by Larry June

A decade removed from trap phones, the San Francisco player preaches compound interest and finally explains who all the advice was for.

Courtesy of The Freeminded Records / EMPIRE.

As a Philly ex-convict who returned from a twenty-year stretch preaching hustle and mindset to anyone with a cellphone, Wallo267 does this for a living these days. On “Go Outside Intro,” he receives a smooth soul groove and carte blanche, rapping about ships on the blade, whispering women, and money turning into more money. Wallo makes for a perfect doorman to the world Larry June has been building for ten years, a Hunters Point native who grew up hustling out of trunks, taking self-employment as his subject—from real estate advice to health lectures, and pistol sales, all at the same unhurried pace. Wallo creates movement. Below him, Larry already has the plans drafted on Who Coppin, patient enough to let compound interest do its work.

It pays off in numbers that he will actually pay, cash taken out of stocks during rough times in “Everything Liquid” and right back into real estate options, hot breakfast in the morning, his clients informed just like shareholders while Aaron Paris and Beat Butcha’s soulful frame roll underneath him. He takes the same advice to himself in “Better Decisions,” stacks kept organized, craft maintained differently, a .45 with a random clip added to the mix, and a straightforward confession that he has never taken a flight private and doesn’t have the model yet. In “3 Calculators” he provides the most humorous one: “My seat back, blunt lit, and I’m touchin’ screens/Workin’ three calculators in a six-speed,” Lancecape and Teeko’s jazz-oriented groove rolling loosely around him, drum and bassline swirling around as he downplays it.

Not a word about the first bankroll gets an explanation, and above DJ Idea’s hard 808s on “The Machinist” he goes back to the green Pontiac making the corners, choppers in the trunk, three phones tracking time, Big D’s in the chain, a self-portrait squeezed into boasting: “I don’t just rap street poet, everybody know it.” “Casual Monday” tells the same dual story in the pace set by Cardo Got Wings, three-hundred-dollar steaks and runway models up front, baking soda and a loaded magazine in the back, along with the nickname his block gave him for it: “They call me Tio Larry when I’m coppin’ weight.” By “The Smooth Kind” he prices everything in one breath, “Money, gold, cars, clothes/Blocks, stoves, chops, hoes,” DJ Idea stripping the track to 808 rhythm and empty space so each item gets to stand on its own.

Jhené Aiko pulls the smitten Larry out of him, floating on Cardo Got Wings’ slow and airy chords on “California Dream” while he assures us with a promise of one woman changing everything, promising us against whoever forever. Musiq Soulchild sings the heart of “Pretty Green Eyes” while he maintains a conversation underneath, owning those fast-living years and offering the woman who stayed the chance to fly out of the country. B-Legit adds something rawer and deeper to “Win or Lose,” cheese in the tuck, truck meetings organized, straight face in front of TSA: “TSA be trippin’, and they probably search me/But all I got are Skittles and a little Hershey.” Larry answers by dividing the world into winners, losers, sellers, and tellers, and admitting that he lived wrong and ate regardless of it.

Swizz Beatz provides the only dud, chanting about not liking haters across “Flex” with each line maintaining the same length, diamonds, commas, houses, an SF90, the word in the title repeated after each one (despite great sample work). A De Bethune on his wrist and deviated stitching in the car deserved better lyrics than one-word hook, and he drifts through “Organic Motion” almost entirely on DJ.Fresh’s Bay bounce, breezy-kiwi-Louis talk thinning out quickly.

He jogs down Lafayette Street with the second phone ringing about a check on “Organically Slidin’,” Cardo Got Wings’ G-funk synth sparkle and rubber bassline making the current moment all sunshine, and then turns back a decade, parking in front of Bob’s and saying, “A bottle of water and some Red Vines/I was sold out before nine.” Narcs searched his car on that night when he happened to be clean, and the relief never went away. “Larry’s Diner pt. 2” is the social version of the same remembering exercise, Billy Bonez, Teeko, and Todd Cooper creating a live room pocket of soul samples around him while he dives into the cooler with emeralds in his bezel, wakes up in cold sweats thinking about snakes, and brags, “You brought sand to the beach, I brought snow to Alaska.”

His mother phoned him in 2012 to tell him to find himself a job, and he outlines the entire history on “Who Coppin”: “I knew the streets was dead, nigga, in 2009,” down on his luck that year, pushing an S5 by 2012 anyway, too involved to quit with a two-year-old son at home: “Wasn’t on no dumb shit, he was just tryna eat.” June Santana and Teeko place the thick bass and warm chords underneath a hook about searching in a box of hope for a heart, but finding a digi scale, a turkey bag, and a yacht, and about what you do when the baby needs diapers, and money doesn’t arrive. “God Got Us (Ain’t Too Many)” comes from the other side of everything, mama a product of the dope game, “I was taught how to survive, but never how to live, man,” the only thing he has ever asked God for being the strength to leave. He has been selling the solution since then, and on “Who Coppin” you can finally hear the price.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Casual Monday,” “Pretty Green Eyes,” “Organically Slidin”