The Past is Present

IN A world where hip-hop’s borders — aesthetic, regional and more — are increasingly porous, making an album as insular as Still Brazy, the second major-label effort by the Compton rapper YG, counts as bold.

Still Brazy is an artisanal, proletarian LA gangster rap record, less tribute to the sound’s golden age than a fullthroated and wholly absorbed recitation. Compton’s history is tattooed on Still Brazy. Almost every song features the gelatinous low end that was a specialty of vintage gangster rap. Twist My Fingaz, the first single, is familiar Compton tough talk, working off an interpolation of Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove, the foundation of Ice Cube’s Bop Gun (One Nation).

The Fatback Band’s Backstrokin’, anchor of so many West Coast rap hits, is used here on the title track. She Wish She Was includes a sample of Mack 10’s Foe Life.

In contrast to Kendrick Lamar, who uses Compton’s rap history as the foundation for fanciful flights of syllabic dexterity and lyrical nerve, YG treats it as destiny. The past is deeply embedded. Last June, he was shot at a LA studio. The attack is a rich text for him to mine — in the form of boasting (“The only one that got hit and was walking the same day”); resignation; or more often, paranoia, as on Who Shot Me? in which YG mulls over the circumstances of his attack, seeing potential enemies everywhere: “Damn, did the homie set me up? ‘Cause we ain’t really been talking much.”

This immediacy is one of the hallmarks of which is, if anything, more straightforward than YG’S 2014 debut, My Krazy Life, which leaned more heavily on storytelling. It’s there in the palpable fatigue on I Got a Question, or the spoken interludes that suggest chaos at every turn.

And it’s also in the album’s explicit politics, a direct response to continuing American racial hostilities. There’s Blacks & Browns, a powerful statement of cross-racial unity, and FDT,A broadside against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, emphasising his divisiveness and dismissiveness — it’s the first great protest song of this insurgent election season.

The album closes with Police Get Away Wit Murder, in which YG recites the names of unarmed victims of police killings. This is gangster rap as agit-pop, and a reminder that it was never anything but. NYT