EP Review: The Prelude by SWAVAY
As just a prelude, SWAVAY diversifies bar rap, money talk, and a robbery story that ends with the fading rapper from verse one walking into his own bedroom.
At the top of the opening track, Jermaine Dupri was still arranging himself out loud in the studio. He said, “Check this out right here, let me get my shit together, hold up.” Behind him, a soul sample scraped at the top. Rattling 808s dropped in. As an Atlanta rapper old enough to have already been through his first run on a major label, SWAVAY broke the intro mid-bar: “I’m on a whole ‘nother level, I’m geekin’.” The EP hands the microphone to the legend, who hands it right back. From there it gets stronger every time the legend leaves the room.
NASAAN’s verse on “YDKM” was the best guest contribution on the EP. Coupe’s beat carried a bouncy syncopation, and SWAVAY rapped over it like he was taking the trash out. Then NASAAN stepped in. The Detroit-born rapper, son of D12’s Proof, opened with a pour for his late girlfriend Mycah Lewis (“Pour up for Mycah/My soul speakin’ Creole”) and followed it with a comparison of handguns to torpedoes: “Niggas ain’t totin’ handguns, .556 look like torpedoes.” He ended on the Young Thug racketeering case: “Take Sign down and bill like Thug and Brian Steel.” The actual stakes of the song belonged to the feature.
One verse on “Doing My Best” turns the EP inside out. Verse two, the longest stretch of writing on the record, makes the financial picture itemize. SWAVAY raps the rent first: “Landlord on my back, and every week I’m late again/Another 100 plus the tax.” Adjacent bars count off a thousand plays that did not amount to anything, a counterfeit kind of progress where every safe cracked has fake bills inside, a job at the mall still on the table, a refused therapy referral, a family fight literally between his mama and his mama. Asking if anyone would love her once she’s gone, Girlfriend’s chorus slips in over the top. Later, on “Juicy Crab 2,” he reports a different total: “I made close to a mill’ in the studio.”
The title promised a setup; the writing here is fiction. “Sixx Minutes” runs a sustained robbery story, set in Atlanta and timed in the title. SWAVAY raps it through with no hook anywhere. It opens on a rapper from his neighborhood whose tape used to play in every car while SWAVAY had nowhere to live. The middle moves to a club, then to a Hawks player’s girlfriend, then to an apartment a few minutes from the door. Then the payoff. SWAVAY was naked in a stranger’s bed near Mount Paran when a black Maybach pulled into the driveway, and the Maybach belonged to the same fading rapper from earlier in the song—her boyfriend, also cheating. Pulled out before he could think it through, the gun turned the encounter into a robbery: “Matter fact, fuck it, hands up, now this a robbery.” Cash, debit cards, clothes, then a drive home with his friend. Door to door, six minutes. Adjacent on “Tony’s Dead,” he answered the Billy 3 question that had been following him for two years with one line: “Just know that I’m moving on God’s watch.” Whatever this EP is a prelude to is a different conversation; the EP sets a casket hook against a short film with an unprintable last act, dares to pick which one to play back, and wins on the second one.
Favorite Track(s): “YDKM,” “Doing My Best,” “Sixx Minutes”