Blue Chips
The Infinite Nihilistic Jest of Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Releasing music in relative obscurity can engender insecurity, the self-doubt mounting with every year critical acclaim and peer recognition doesn’t arrive. Brian Ennals was intimately familiar with that disheartening reality for a decade. Throughout the 2010s, the Baltimore rapper’s sporadic solo projects gained little traction, and songs with short-lived groups either languished on hard drives or were quietly buried on the back pages of small blogs. Following the release of King Cobra (Phantom Limb), his second album of brilliant tragicomic nihilism produced by fellow Baltimorean Infinity Knives, Ennals’ career narrative is slowly changing. “It was always weird to tell peo...
Jay Worthy’s World
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. By most metrics, Jay Worthy is refreshingly accessible, communicative, and punctual for a rapper of his stature. He has hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify and millions of streams to his name. Still, with no manager, regular publicist, or team of record execs behind him, he fields interview requests personally. He’s applied this hands-on approach his entire career, quietly rising through the ranks of West Coast rap. “If I was in the hood, I would’ve had you pull up to [Gonzales or Enterprise Park]. If I was at my house, I would’ve got you to meet me at the Bel-Air Hotel,” Worthy says over the phone. He’s lived in Los Angeles since the early 2000s, but sched...
BLK ODYSSY’s Vintage Contemporary
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Soon, a music critic will write an essay on the glut of “new” artists copying their influences wholesale. Said critic could quickly point to the hordes of double cup-clutching Future aspirants with higher chances of rehab stints than platinum records or the Young Thug-clone industrial complex. To offer an antithesis to the plague of parodies, they might look to Juwan Elcock, the 25-year-old frontman of BLK ODYSSY. Inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, Elcock wades deeply into personal, cultural, and sociopolitical waters while deftly fusing decades of Black music on BLK ODYSSY’s 2021 debut, BLK VINTAGE, and late June’s BLK VINTAGE: THE REPRISE. “[TPAB] really cha...
Young Slo-Be’s Southeast Mentality
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Young Slo-Be is likely older than his peers in Stockton, California’s burgeoning rap scene, but he slyly refuses to reveal his age. “I tell people [my age] all the time,” Slo-Be says over the phone, his smirk practically audible before he delivers the canned punchline: “I’m 2100.” Slo-Be doesn’t claim vampiric immortality, just an undying devotion to the 2100 block of Nightingale Ave. (aka “the G”) in the southeast section of the Central California city. Though his family lived in a comparatively quiet cul-de-sac, he walked to the perennially hot corner of Seventh and Nightingale every day. Slo-Be stands beneath that street sign on the blood-red cover of this month’s Southea...
Defcee Pays It Forward
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Water sloshes in the background when Adam Levin answers the phone. Bath time ran longer than anticipated, so the 32-year-old Chicagoan calls back when his infant daughter is occupied with episodes of Sesame Street. Teacher by day, recent father and husband by night, Levin also raps as Defcee whenever possible. These days, multi-tasking is imperative. “I’m still figuring out how to structure my time to honor all of my commitments in full,” he says on a Tuesday evening in late May. After a decade-plus of veritable obscurity and spotty releases, Levin’s released a series of increasingly gripping albums and EPs since 2018, including April’s For All Debts Public and Private on Cl...
T.F Blames Kansas
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. T.F’s memoir could open in a blazing Southern California wildfire. At 18, he and fellow incarcerated firefighters cut smoldering brush and dug parched soil to prevent towering flames from incinerating more acres of hillsides and mountains. He once nearly died when gallons of viscous aerial retardant dropped from a plane knocked him onto the side of a cliff. Today, the 36-year-old L.A. rapper has yet to commit that sweltering carceral nightmare to record. “In the book that I’m putting together, we’re only on chapter three out of a hundred. I still have so much to say,” T.F says. Wearing navy blue from his Polo hat and hoodie to his basketball shorts, he speaks while leani...
Baby Stone Gorillas Keep Going
Is it sacrilegious to smoke weed inside a decommissioned church? This seems to be the central question for Baby Stone Gorillas on the set of their “Keep Goin” music video. Dress shirts for the video, the ticking clock on the church rental, our interview — these are afterthoughts for the burgeoning Los Angeles rap group as they exhale the only clouds under the blue sky and blinding sun above the church steps in Glassell Park. When they’ve procured their forgotten dress shirts and ashed their blunts, EKillaOffDaBlocck (21), 5Much (19), P4K (20), and Top5ivee (22) saunter past dark wooden pews and up to the carpeted burgundy altar in the humble, aged, and mercifully cool building. They stand behind four soundless microphones and in front of a lone cameraman, preaching the gospel of perseveran...
EBK Young Joc’s Song of the Nightingale Legend
San Joaquin County Jail, like most jails, records and monitors inmate phone calls. When EBK Young Joc calls for our interview, the Stockton, California-born rapper is understandably wary of saying anything the Sheriff’s Department might characterize as incriminating. (See the recent case of Baton Rouge rapper Lit Yoshi, whose recorded prison phone calls were played as evidence in court.) Granted, the connection on his prison-issue tablet is full of static, his grumbled and half-whispered words rarely rising above it. “I can’t talk too much over the phone. I wish I was out, so we could do a real interview,” Joc explains during a brief discussion of his early work with rap group-turned-clique EBK Hotboiiz. “They be trying to indict us. We’re already known in Stockton. They’re probably going ...
BounceBackMeek’s West Side Story
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. If you know Stockton, California’s high homicide rates and the gang activity, poverty, and institutional neglect that account for them, Louis Park seems located in a different zip code. The lush, green park is interspersed with towering trees, barbecue pits, picnic tables, handball courts, and baseball diamonds. Docks jut into the bordering San Joaquin River, where BounceBackMeek and his friends go boating during the summer, their most private conversations partly spoken in Khmer. For Meek, the 24-year-old grandson of Cambodian immigrants and one of the brightest talents in Stockton rap’s first golden age, Louis Park is a sanctuary. “That’s a safe place for us. I can hav...
The Bin Reaper
The best NBA players outwork their peers in practice. They shoot more jump shots, run extra sprints, hit higher reps in the weight room. Since emerging as the breakout star of Detroit rap trio Shittyboyz, BabyTron has approached recording projects like Sleeve Nash and Luka Troncic (both puns on NBA all-stars past and present) with a similar, almost athletic devotion. He spends most days in the studio, stringing together non-sequiturs of generation-spanning references to NBA players and pop culture over the breakneck, electro-leaning beats that define the ShittyBoyz’s sound. Each of the four projects he’s released in 2021— two solo and one with each member of ShittyBoyz — offers sharper, more hilarious punchlines about lucrative digital scams, designer clothes, women, weed, and wock (also r...
God’s in the Mirror
Trauma can be inherited, generationally compounded by relatives who pass on their pain through destructive action or the self-destructive coping mechanisms they impart. Lukah has made music for two-thirds of his life, but when the 30-year-old rapper/producer finally found his sound, he honed in on the accretive effects of trauma. On January’s When the Black Hand Touches You and late September’s Why Look Up, God’s in the Mirror, he offers Griselda-adjacent street rap as a Trojan Horse for psychology and sociology. Alternately menacing and soulful loops score Lukah’s sharp wordplay, braggadocio, hustling narratives, and avowals of pistol-grip survival. Within that framework, he couches self-empowerment and the need to address personal and inherited wounds in the Black community. “And never a...
The Trap Door
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. If you’ve watched televised sports since late May, you’ve heard Solemn Brigham rap. His energetic southern voice soundtracks a Gatorade commercial that runs more often than Sydney McLaughlin and the ad’s other athletes. Every rerun finds you anticipating the North Carolinian’s relaxed yet forceful slant rhymes from “Future Power Sources”: “I been on my get back, cop a bag slow / You would never see that, use the trap door.” Gatorade selected the song from 2020’s Marlowe 2, Brigham’s second album with producer and fellow North Carolinian L’Orange under the Marlowe moniker. Following the first air-date, he’s fielded countless calls and texts of support. Though appreciative...
