Album Review: With No Due Respect by Foggieraw
Foggieraw’s Mercury debut is a sweet charm offensive where the bars land faster than the feelings do, and the Bible verses sit right next to the booty jokes.
Most rappers who blow up off short-form video trade in aggression or melodrama. The clips that racked up millions for a Prince George’s County kid born in Ghana were something stranger. A guy in a diner apron, reciting a poem over Alicia Keys piano chords, asking an ex whether their relationship would still be sacred if he’d already seen her naked. The video ran about a minute. It got Drake to hit follow. It got Keys herself to clear the sample and sit down for a session. When Jesse Owusu, who raps under the name Foggieraw, showed up at the 2023 BET Hip Hop Awards cypher alongside Symba, Scar Lip, and Cassidy, spitting over Swizz Beatz production, his whole pitch was already clear.
He played piano and saxophone through high school in PG County, freestyled with his roommates at Bowie State, dropped an independent debut called Fogtavious Vandross back in 2018, and then spent the better part of five years perfecting a format nobody else was doing. Sixty-to-ninety-second “poems” posted direct to Instagram and TikTok, no DSP release, no rollout, just a charismatic dude in fly outfits rapping to his phone about girls and God. Now Mercury Records has given him a real budget and a real feature list, and With No Due Respect is the first full evidence of what happens when you let him stretch past ninety seconds.
Seventeen songs, and nearly all of them are about a woman Foggie wants, somebody Foggie lost, or the God he’s trying to keep in the conversation while both things happen. The range of that fixation is the album’s engine. “Psalm and Islam” opens with “All praise be to God, Wa Alaikum Salaam/I’m a Christian, and you’re a Muslim/I study Psalm and you study Islam.” He names the conflict plain, with Gwen Bunn and Dave James singing the chorus underneath, and by the back half, the hypotheticals get sharper. What religion does the baby practice? What if she doesn’t want her hair natural? What if she wants to leave the church? Foggie writes them as actual panic, the voice of a man who caught real feelings across a line his family drew before he was born. The bridge arrives when Gwen Bunn sings, “Had to really change up my values/But I want you either way,” and you catch him saying something he hasn’t said out loud before. “Faith Lies” does something adjacent, flipping a sample-driven refrain while cataloging impossible standards. She wants a thug with a degree who can also pastor. He wants a woman who’s somehow both modest and acrobatic.
Foggie’s humor is real. Not comedian-rapper humor, where the setup gets milked for virality. More the kind where you say something wild because you’d rather be funny than admit how exposed you are. “Bitchertation” is built entirely as a stand-up set, opening with a joke about the longest rope in the world (“It’s yours”), then rattling off punchlines about Democrats legislating his spending, Republicans renovating his neighborhood, and Rapsody being loved by young and old women. He shouts out the altar mid-bar, raps about his daughter wanting green hair and vintage Polo splicing, and closes the whole thing with a curtain call: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been an honor and a privilege, but not for me.” “Unisex” pulls a different kind of comedy, running into Pharrell on a date and asking for a picture, calling him his favorite poet, then swerving into a bridge about getting old together with creaky joints and God pointing fingers. The tonal pivots are fast and disorienting, which is the point. Foggie won’t sit in one feeling long enough for it to calcify.
“Psalm 62” earned its spot on this record years before the record existed, and it still hits different surrounded by the other sixteen songs. Isolated as a viral clip, the Alicia Keys interpolation was a charm play. Inside With No Due Respect, it picks up weight from everything around it. You’ve already heard Foggie talk about women across ten or eleven other cuts, cycling through lust, devotion, jealousy, confusion, so when the second half drops and he starts asking whether he’s just the test dummy she’ll use to learn how to love, and whether she’s posting a new man to provoke him, the bravado cracks.
“We said we’d see other people but bitch, you did it?
You wasn’t supposed to go do it!”
The backpedal is immediate: “You know I don’t really think you’re a bitch/You’re just leaving my heart cold, you upset me.” The whole song collapses into a man losing an argument with his own pride in front of an audience.
The features split evenly between prestige gets and smart fits. Ari Lennox on “Stay Awhile” belongs in the second camp. Her voice wraps around Foggie’s alliterative second verse without competing with it, and the bridge where she sings about running out of patience against his obligation-heavy schedule sounds lived in, not guest-spotted. Larry June brings his own ecosystem to “Disrespectfully Decline,” rapping about cigar smoke, egg white omelets, and deviated-stitch Porsches in the space Foggie carved for dismissing haters. The two never actually interact on the cut, which works because the whole point is parallel confidence. Foggie says “fuck no” to people who steal his swag, and June says “fuck no” to people who waste his time. John Legend singing the hook on “Grow Up” is the biggest name and the loosest fit. The track is Foggie at his most scattered, bouncing from ASCAP jokes about a girl’s body to “Committed to, addicted to, restricted by forbidden fruit” to a Mr. Miyagi punchline, and Legend keeps crooning “Is it too late to grow up?” without the bars ever really engaging with the question. KARRAHBOOO on “Mo Money Than Ur Dad,” surprisingly, works, her contribution a tight sprint about flipping bags without spatulas and brothers doing four years like a bachelor degree.
There are stretches where the quantity thins the material. “Cadillac” has a strong back half about a woman named Jada who only likes Foggie now that he’s an entertainer, but the first verse sets up a different scenario entirely, and neither one develops past a few bars. “Thinking With My Heart” namedrops seven hoes in Atlanta and then shifts into a second section about a tender relationship with childhood detail, as if it can’t decide whether the song is a player anthem or a confession. Some of the punchlines with “Look at me sideways, is this Paul Wall?” and “Your booty not that fat, but it’s real” both catch you off guard. When Foggie stacks wordplay just for the sake of it, the freestyle muscle starts doing the work that album-craft should be doing.
The sharpest turn on the record is “Huey and Riley.” Named after the Boondocks brothers who split the difference between radical and reckless, the song opens with Foggie and his brother against the world: “Since I been a baby, just been me and my baby brother/We ain’t have no other siblings, just had one another /Cuddled by a hundred thousand roses from my mother/Hardened by a rough lack of compassion from my father.” The verse builds through comparisons to Lil Wayne dropping Tha Carter and Young Thug dropping Barter, all used as examples of going harder when the season gets ugly. Then the second half slips into violence: “Niggas might get shot buying Jordans in PG Plaza, they wearing a shiesty.” It ends with him telling his wifey he can’t give her his money because he’s sending it to his old girl, and it’s unclear whether old girl means his mother or somebody else. It’s the one moment on the LP where the jokes shut off and the writing earns its weight without a safety net.
With No Due Respect is a debut that oversells quantity and undersells editing, but the personality at its center is too specific and too funny to dismiss. Foggie is a Ghanaian-American kid from PG County who played piano before he rapped, who got co-signs from SZA and Anderson .Paak and Ms. Lauryn Hill before he had a proper album out, and who built his audience by posting minute-long poems about sex and scripture to his phone. The album plays like all of that compressed into a single sitting. It’s crowded, it’s occasionally half-finished, and at its best, it makes you want to hear what happens when he gives himself room to stay in one thought longer than forty-five seconds. The features are stacked. The writing, when it connects, is unlike anybody else working right now. The question is whether the next record lets the depth catch up to the charm.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Huey and Riley,” “Psalm and Islam,” “Psalm 62”