If form does, in fact, follow function, then it’s fitting that the one time Serengeti sounds like Drake is when he’s rapping as a character whose mansion was sold to a “crypto kid from Miami.” “He put LED lights in the tiger room,” the narrator says, “that shit offended me badly.” That last clause, which comes just six seconds into Geti’s new EP, boxer driver, is so deeply Grahamish that it initially scans as an impression. But while the syntax is a perfect match, this boxer character—washed up, deeply in debt, alienated from his family, scarfing egg whites over his kitchen sink—has none of Drake’s gambling app-underwritten joie de vivre, none of the glint that suggests he knows this is all a little ridiculous. For the boxer, the revolving vultures are several steps closer to true predators. When, at the end of this opening song, he peers through his blinds and sees a black sedan idling outside, he runs through the possibilities: repo men, tabloid stringers, enforcers sent by people sick of waiting on wire transfers. Instead, it’s simply his ride to an appearance he’d forgotten he’d agreed to.
boxer driver’s title is literal. The record, which runs a little under 15 minutes and is produced entirely by DJ Crucial, is structured like a two-man play, where both that boxer and his newly contracted driver voice their inner monologues. They have many of the same problems: their sons have largely rejected them (one sends an expensive watch, meant as a birthday present, back with no note, the other offers only one-word responses to the immigrant dad whose accent now embarrasses him); they’ve been stripped of their one-time professions (the driver built engines and taught in his home country). While one man is still wearing a watch that costs more than the other is paid in a year, neither has enough money, and when they pull up alongside the windows of a building at dusk, they both see their fathers in the reflection.
Geti, who already this year has dropped the loose, exploratory symphony of psalms, the buoyant shark attack, and KENNYV, a sprawling and occasionally hallucinatory masterstroke in his Kenny Dennis saga, treats money like water on pavement, following it into every crevice and fault line. “You ever notice how rich people love saying ‘Be present’?” he quips at one point. “Every cousin had a business,” the boxer says at one point, explaining where his $40 million fortune went. “Every business was a disaster.” The driver’s son thinks his father’s job is more impressive than it really is—he didn’t lie, he explained, his son just filled in the blanks the way he needed to. Collection agents have voices “calm as hospice nurses.” Phones vibrate on tables with unknown numbers from familiar area codes. An old friend-turned-creditor looks around an empty living room and smirks: “Damn, Champ, minimalism?”
But he also reaches for something more elemental, the little sorrows and dangling albatrosses for which money acts as a symbol. “Everybody say ‘Pay your debts’ like debts is math.” One of the men—at points, the concerns overlap in such a way that it’s not clear which character is voicing something—notes that when you’re broke, “even your anger know it’s a joke,” your voice betraying you. There’s the Thoreau quote about men leading lives of quiet desperation; Geti’s characters let it grow louder bit by bit, rattling like the engine of a sedan that its driver could fix, if only his boss allowed him to touch it.