The Rap-Up: California Dreaming
We break down the most exciting new singles from Southern California.
SieteGang Yabbie, “Phuka BATCH ANTHEM”
Besides being one of the most gifted flow-finders in rap, San Diego’s SieteGang Yabbie might be even better at world-building. He’s created a whole mythology around himself and his people, or his “feets,” as he calls them. They even wear chains with diamond feet on them. Everyone and everything in sight is a yop. Yop is also a verb that can mean anything they want it to mean. The possibilities are endless. All his people live on Foot Island, and did I mention they’re also all jank babies?
His comment sections are littered with fans echoing his yops and other ad-libs, while his discography fills out the mythology even further:
The Original Jank Baby
Foot Friends
Gertified Foot Boy
Foot Fun
Foot Fun Vol#2
Jank Baby Foot Island
Yop Yabbie
Yop Yabbie 2
The Foot Print
It’s hard to think of another rapper whose catalog feels quite so much like an encyclopedia of his own increasingly elaborate inside jokes.
His beat selection reinforces the mythical nature of Foot Island. The ones he and his squad choose to rap over are always enormous, almost Biblical in scale. The beat for “Phuka BATCH ANTHEM” is a storm cloud over the island, crackling with pent-up electricity and lifted by dramatic, pitched-up vocals. All the parts crash together in ways that shouldn’t work, but somehow find their grooves within each other at the last possible moment.
Yabbie lords over the world he’s created, larger than life and twisting reality into a slightly psychedelic fever dream, reinforced by a growing collection of absurdist skits with recurring characters doing Waiting For Godot-type challenges. His flows are spastic and his bars and ad-libs splash down from the clouds, bouncing and twisting in weird directions against the concrete of Foot Island.
The whole thing is wonderfully stupid in the best way, but underneath it is some seriously deft rapping and creative flow work. Stepping into his universe is one of the more fun and rewarding experiences a rap fan can have. The lyrics on “Phuka BATCH ANTHEM” are, to put it mildly, not in the best taste. But in Yabbie’s story-world, there are no rules.
Frostydasnowmann & Flashy B, “No BFE”
Flashy B is a frequent collaborator of Yabbie’s from the same area of SD, and is also part of the whole SieteGang crew. Here, he teams up with Inglewood’s Frostydasnowmann, who brings his own lexicon full of “gurbs” and “snowgurbers” to the table, as he continues his comeback. On “No BFE” though, he’s in Flashy’s world and “can’t fuck with no broke feets who don’t got cash for me.”
The beat, held down by a flute ditty, sounds like a breezy summer day, and sits in contrast to Frosty teeing off, rapping increasingly unhinged bars about the pimp lifestyle—women breaking all his things because they want him so bad, heavy payments for heavier women, and other not-so-savory activities. Flashy dances on the beat too with more slippery raps about the women he comports with: “She say she want the Gucci high heels from Saks Fifth, steppin’ on a razor blade, looking like an actress/Your girl look bad on the net, in person she a catfish.” This is a dangerous combo, and hopefully the L.A.-SD connection keeps producing more of these cross-pollinations.
Figgstar & Lil AB, “Lights”
This song has a weird little magic to it. The beat feels like one of those childhood tilting table games where you have to keep the marbles on it, and Figgstar and Lil AB are the marbles. The two rappers, hailing from the same L.A. neighborhood as Crip Mac (the 50’s), play a nice balancing act with their flows and melodies, leaning one way, then the other, to maintain stability. They seem to instinctively know when to pull themselves back toward the center. It gives the song a strange little tension, like the whole thing could tip over at any moment.
Txny4, “NSA” f/ CBK4
We’re counting down the blocks in L.A. now. Our last track was from the 50’s (or the Nifties as they call it), and now we make our way to the 40’s, home of X4, for another heater. The drums on “NSA” have this blunt, almost physical quality that defined the Hoover sound of the early 2020s. It’s a sort of low-slung bounce with a forward lurch to it, and the rappers slither through the crevices, finding little pockets to wrap their voices around.
Both rappers’ voices have an almost intentionally poor mix, with a graininess that subtly emulates a jail phone. And they have a sly wit, rapping that they’re hopping a bus to get away from a crime scene. Their combination of menace, humor, and rough-around-the-edges production is nothing new to L.A. street rap, but when it hits, it hits. There is real personality here, the type that gets sanded off in the more polished corners of rap. It’s mostly endearing, but we’d all prefer if they’d stop calling their opps “fags.”
Gkeemy, “Free Who Matters”
One of my favorite little tics in rap is when an artist leads into a song by murmuring portions of the hook. 03 Greedo has perfected the move, but there’s something satisfying about anyone who can do it well. By the time the real hook kicks in, you’ve already heard it once, almost like a memory. It creates this sense of intimacy, like you’re catching the rapper alone in their room weeks after they recorded the song, still absentmindedly humming it.
There’s not much online about Gkeemy, and this video sits under 800 views at the time of writing, but a little sleuthing reveals he’s either part of or affiliated with the FazoSquad rap group out of Miami. “Free Who Matters” is a fun song with some sweet melodies, and Gkeemy has the kind of promising X-factor instincts that make you want to go digging through the rest of his catalog.
GrincHwalk “Free da Bg’z” f/ KingBG & FiGg RicH
This is a good song, not a great song, but I love when guys do math on wax.
“Million dollar bail, drop it to 250/Ten percent of that, that’s 25 racks/30 thousand for my lawyer and I still got my cuban/Big Check docked with steppers, how you think I got this cuban?”