Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, weird tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention.
An early check-in on this year’s finest mixtapes
The other night I was listening to Hot 97 and, after a seemingly endless mix of boring-ass Drake and 21 Savage album cuts, that Lil Uzi Vert club song that won’t go away, and the bubblegum Coi Leray hit that is at least letting Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five cash some well-deserved checks, I was so happy to retreat back to my aux cord. With mainstream rap in an especially stagnant place, it’s worth remembering that there is still cooler shit out there beyond the typical stations and playlists. So I decided to use this week’s column to highlight eight mixtapes—from Brooklyn to D.C. to the current holder of my heart, Milwaukee—that I don’t expect to ever fall in favor with rap’s most prominent gatekeepers but still deserve more attention.
Exes duck and cover, lame-ass dudes grab your shields—Bktherula is firing shots up and down LVL5 P1. With a knack for vocal improvisation on par with Detroit’s finest and a delightfully random assortment of beats, the Atlanta rapper has made her best mixtape yet. I can’t really decide which version of Bk I like the most: She can be vulnerable and gentle, aggressive and mean, or lovestruck and enchanted. A lot of the time she’s many of these things at once. Favorites include “Crazy Girl,” where she vents about a past fling who is telling everyone that she is nuts, though they were really the one bugging. Or the rushed feel of “No Adlibs,” complete with punchlines like, “I’m twisting and pulling your bitch like a Bop It.” No matter the mood, real and raw emotions go a long way.
Lots of today’s fast rappers use the speedy stylistic turn as a way to cover up for the fact that they are just corny. Not Starker. Raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s Cooper Houses, he reminds us that dizzying flows can be cool when you actually have a personality. His latest project, Spiridon, produced by Theravada, is a scatterbrained mad dash of New York-specific memories and locations (“at Jamaica train station, right in front of the Golden Krust”) and references to comic books, fashion, and NBA players who haven’t suited up in more than a decade. He might even drop in a tight, one-bar TV review: “Shit ain’t funny like the 11th season of Curb, word,” he blusters. Fast rapping is ready for a resurgence.
Vayda brings you directly into her brainspace on breeze. You might get a little lost while tracing her unconnected thoughts, but they sound so sweet over the tape’s colorful beats. Most of the time it seems like she’s daydreaming, as if she were a bored character from an ’80s teen movie who just wants to get out of their hometown: “I got me a bougie nigga from Miami/Planning on moving me out of Decatur,” she sing-raps on “ulovemequestionmarkwinkyface.” Relationship issues occasionally cross her mind, but they never feel that pressing, because her thoughts race by so fast that love or heartbreak never really get the chance to settle in.
Drug kingpin Avon Barksdale is the Wire character that is most mythologized in rap, and it’s easy to see why: 1) He’s incredibly cool. 2) He’s ruthless but rationalizes it with a moral code. 3) He has a tendency to speak in drawn-out monologues that sound effortlessly wise. On Paco Panama’s mixtape named after David Simon’s landmark HBO series, Avon feels like a spiritual influence.
Over the course of 15 tracks, the D.C. rapper fleshes out an ecosystem full of dealers, lookout boys, cops, and addicts—clearly inspired by Detroit duo Los and Nutty’s street epics (the homage pays off with a Los feature on “Special Feeling 3”). Paco has the voice of a bruiser, but the underlying mood of his flashbacks is melancholic and conflicted. On “Coffee Donuts” he tells a story of his father’s guilt about setting a bad example; on “Break It Down” his girlfriend wants him to leave hustling in the rearview, but then he asks her, “If I don’t trap who gon’ take yo’ ass to Florida?” Meanwhile, on “Avon,” he draws a figurative line of his own: “Junkies getting younger and younger, and I ain’t tryna serve children.” He’s stuck in a moral dilemma: Does having a code absolve you?
Word to Too $hort’s Cocktails, you know you’re listening to the right rap album when there’s a diss of the current president on the intro. “Feel like the country been even worse since they elected Biden,” editorializes Mari Montana on “Most Hated,” the first song from Outstanding Member. The West Palm Beach, Florida flamethrower never softens his feelings on the tape—whether fueled by rage or pain or distrust, he’s going to let you know what’s going on in the darkest corners of his mind in a way that resembles Nashville’s Starlito. Laid down over a collection of beats that pull as much from the murkiest side of South Florida production as late ’90s and early 2000s New Orleans bounce, Mari doesn’t hold back.
Getting to the bag has never sounded so heart-wrenching. On 448 Pt. 2 Milwaukee’s Dai Ballin wails about the ice on his wrist and the cash overstuffed in his pockets with the type of Auto-Tune-aided melodic yearning usually reserved for songs about breakups and anguish. Joined by a battalion of his city’s finest, like SME Taxfree, Funny $Money, and Munch Lauren, Dai Ballin is never overshadowed, his high-pitched pining always distinguishable among the revolving door of guests. As far as skittering Milwaukee beats go, the ones here are on the atmospheric end. And it all sounds coolest when Dai Ballin is just riffing through Auto-Tune so thick that he sounds underwater.
Cyborgian Milwaukee songbird Mari Boy Mula Mar is in his feels for real on Bitty Breaker. But instead of declaring his love with sweet nothings, he lets the bag do the talking. “Baby you so bad I might just pay your car note,” he sings, his vocals soft and plushy, on “Personal Trick,” which is about exactly what the title suggests. As he coos about romantic deeds like funding designer shopping sprees and investing in her day-care business, you can practically feel him blushing behind his Cartier shades. And every now and then he drops in a line for those who really fall hard: “It turn me on when you french tip your toenails.” Hallmark, hit him up.
Three Milwaukee mixtapes in a row might be overkill, but I only speak my truth. On Who Is Ju??, Tae Rackzz and RTM Ju are joined by a ton of other (likely teenage) rappers to dig deep in their hearts and talk about the two essential activities that make life worthwhile: hanging with the bros and seeing girls twerk at the party. Maybe they’ll get money or throw subliminals at a few neighborhood goons sometimes, but it always circles back to those core concepts. With their straightforward, nearly spoken word flows alongside beats that spam the handclap preset so much that the tape feels like one long song, it’s nonstop, chaotic fun.
Yung Miami’s acting in on BMF is so bad that it’s good
A couple of weeks ago the City Girls’ Yung Miami made her acting debut on Starz’s 50 Cent-produced melodrama BMF and quickly became the butt of so many jokes online. She plays the girlfriend of some drug dealer whose name I never learned, and when he is killed, Meech, the leader of the Black Mafia Family that the show is based on, breaks the news of her boyfriend’s killing to her by bringing his chain. In a nightgown and headwrap, she breaks down, crying into the jewels and smacking Meech across the face. The jokes are warranted: She’s as stilted as a wax figure as she tries to muster up any sort of relatively human emotion. It’s like she’s never seen someone cry before, or even imagined it. But I would argue it’s so hilariously bad that it’s perfect, since BMF, a soap opera with drugs and guns, is a show that is also hilariously bad. Fuck it, bring her back next season.
Karrahbooo: “Box the 40”
Karrahbooo is from Atlanta, but the most recognizable sounds on “Box the 40” are from Cali and Michigan. The thudding percussion is rooted in the West Coast rap scene, while her flow resembles Flint’s YN Jay in the way she stretches her bars with conversational oddities. But the song is more than an amalgamation of influences—her punchlines are sharp and catchy, even if they’re fairly straightforward: “I ain’t answer his DMs, he fake famous/Made a nigga eat my cookie like Famous Amos.” After two or three listens, you’ll know all the words by heart.
Sai: “?!1%”
It’s easy to get lost in the cosmic experiments on Newark, New Jersey rapper Sai’s SoundCloud page. They’re usually under two minutes, but they feel longer because of Sai’s unhurried and pitch-tweaked melodic flows, as well as the misty beat selection. “?!1%” is one of their more fleshed-out singles, with a slow-moving, washed-out build that turns into a drum’n’bass breakdown so light and distant that it feels like you’re listening from the bathroom of a club.
Lil Bo 954: “Out the Door”
Lil Bo 954 captures snapshots of his past and current life on “Out the Door.” In a half-sung, half-rapped style, and with a tinge of blues in his voice, he flashes back to the days when his pillow cases were dirty and looks forward to a possible appearance at church in the morning. The slow-burning introspection in his lyrics taps more into the spirit of Alabama crooners like NoCap than that of his Broward County peers. In less than two minutes, you get a three dimensional view of who Lil Bo is: a wounded storyteller.
Michael Kwame: “Going With All”
This is the type of heartfelt song you would have stumbled into back in the heyday of hip-hop’s blog era; there’s the woozy, self-made beat and the way Michael Kwame delivers introspective lines like he’s got his head in the clouds. But what keeps me coming back isn’t the familiarity, it’s the Virgina rapper-producer’s relatable lyrics. “How do you live with the losses, lessons, and being wrong?” he asks at one point, before diving into personal ruts carved out by self-doubt and restrained feelings. The hard and inspired rapping is smashed between a wistful hook, making it even more evocative.
Ice Spice, thank you for saving the Knicks
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