Sure, titles like “Made it Out” are reminders that the New Jersey rapper just shook off decades of jail time, but even the most explicit engagement with the court case refrains from ham-handed reckoning in favor of unapologetic flexes, like the kickoff, “ I clutch the slimmy that was stocky and some beef and broccoli/ And smoke a choppy with a mami on my way to papi.” Far from a calculated return to form, After the Verdict is a refinement of the gnarled, snappish flows we heard on Finesse the World unspooled over a trim batch of ghoulish instrumentals from GRiMM Doza. It’s far too easy to let the details of RetcH’s run-ins with the law overcloud what After the Verdict properly announces: that the man is back on his bullshit.
Clearly, to attain this Level, you have to kill a few idols first. And, of course, it’s all wrapped in cover art that slyly references Greedo’s iconoclastic streak, the last laugh in a sordid state of affairs. As Jeff Weiss puts it in his heartfelt profile, “a Greedo song exists for every emotion and every occasion,” and no less so than across God Level’s expanse: there’s more conventional going in alongside post-Thugger gurgle West Coast bounce here, blown-out trap there. Greedo utilizes the hour-and-a-half-plus to cover plenty of stylistic ground, with a knowing and foreboding, yet never overly rueful, presence behind the mic. Of course, context is everything: this, his self-proclaimed debut album, came amidst the commencement of his 20-year prison sentence, a fact plainly reflected in the sheer breadth and depth of this project. – Samuel Diamondĭon’t doubt that God Level is the most compelling of 03 Greedo’s offerings to date, almost entirely by design. Yes, it’s just a sampling, dreamy and incomplete, but selective, like picking curios from a cabinet or fishing life in the notochords, curated by your favorite jet-setting rap connoisseurs, this one writing from the suburbs of Nashville, where the flea market dollar bins are like the barbecues, i.e., smoking. Onto our informal survey of July 2018 then: nine writers, 14 tapes, mad points of reference and impressions, scenes and feels. You could, but we at TMT would be much too busy listening to mixtapes to participate in that academic exercise. You could argue that the prolific nature of modern mixtape milieus makes for a mess of inaccessibility. (Check out last month’s installment here.)
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The focus will primarily be on rap mixtapes - loosely defined here as free (or sometimes free-to-stream) digital releases - but we’ll keep things loose enough to branch out if/when we feel it necessary. In this column, we aim to immerse ourselves in this hyper-prolific world and share our favorite releases each month.
With a cascade of releases spewing from the likes of DatPiff, LiveMixtapes, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud, it can be difficult to keep up with the overbearing yet increasingly vital mixtape game.
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