The Rap-Up: Ghosts
Harley Geffner runs down new tracks by RXKNephew, Parkbaby, T9ine, Quando Rondo, and more.
RXKNephew X RXKZeroTheGod, “Dear Gucci”
Have you ever experienced genuine betrayal? Everyone has moments when they feel as if they were slighted or wronged—but real, genuine betrayal? Very few of us have felt that Caesarian fury. This is precisely what Neph is going through on this track, as he comes to terms with the fact that his one-time hero, Gucci Mane, is in fact, a “bitch.” His words, not mine.
The list of grievances is long (and also quite homophobic). The betrayal stings even worse because ‘All White Bricks’ used to be Neph’s shit. Now? Gucci is apologizing for his legendary Twitter rants. He switched up at 46. He’s fucking up Young Scooter’s songs. Neph has a whole list of people who would have never snitched in his situation. And Mr. Davis’s worst crime? He’s doing songs with Bruno Mars.
Parkbaby, “By Da Plenty”
Parkbaby hails from Toronto’s Regent Park neighborhood, whose first image on Google search is a series of projects being bulldozed. A reddit real-estate forum says it’s an “up and coming” neighborhood whose retail amenities could be better, but the gang violence and prostitution has calmed down enough to make it a good place to invest. Watch out for “problematic” tenants though… you know a lot of these rental units are still subsidized.
Against a situational backdrop as old as modernity, Parkbaby’s melodies hang in the air like a thick smog. He’s stone-faced in the video, except for a brief thumbs-up and cheeky half-smile when he says touching his first 100K was awesome. The beat and Parkbaby’s flows are vaguely reminiscent of Future’s “March Madness.” They spin and re-center, finding balance in the numbness. Parkbaby mostly shrugs through it, and the melodies do the emotional heavy lifting. The song, though numbed through and through, never sinks into that foggy gray Toronto atmosphere where everything feels like it’s cold, even when it isn’t. It’s a muted triumphalism, and to Parkbaby, success feels provisional, like it could be retracted if he looks at it too directly.
T9ine, “Been Graduated”
We’ve covered Tampa Bay’s semi-reclusive T9ine fairly extensively in past rap ups, but every release is still trance-inducing. With his sparse catalog of singles, he picks these spacey beats and floats through them in a way that seems to transcend all physical limitation. He makes chilling on his friend’s porch, or hotboxing his old car sound like something slightly unreal, as if you’re staring at it through a hazy memory.
Without any big emotional peaks or manufactured urgency, his flows are a steady drift. He’s carrying you downstream and his memories start to feel like your own. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but his music keeps landing the exact same way every time, in some liminal space between present and gone.
Quando Rondo, “Nobody Loyal”
It’s 5:30 p.m. and you’re at a gas station right next to the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, a shining beacon of late-stage capitalism. People from all over the world come here to get duped by a Bloomingdales that looks like every other Bloomingdales. You’re a successful rapper who hails from the Hitch Village Projects in Savannah, Georgia. You’ve earned enough money to be shopping in L.A., which is, in and of itself, a top single-percentile outcome for someone with your demographic stats.
But on a beautiful summer evening, celebrating life and success by living it to the excess, tragedy strikes: A drive-by shooting targeting your car takes the life of your best friend. Police pull his bloodied body out of his seat while you wail on the sidewalk. You try to will the sirens quiet as tourists sneak glances. Everything is too loud, too much.
Close your eyes and imagine having lived this. This is what Quando Rondo experienced on the evening of August 19th, 2022. Since then, Rondo has released a bevy of songs addressing the pain. He also caught a charge in 2023, which included one count of illegal use of a cell phone, among violations of Georgia’s controlled substances law. He ended up pleading to “conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute controlled substances (marijuana),” a drug whose dosages are discussed by yoga moms over wine on the porch and consumed in the form of neon gummies.
Rondo turned himself in earlier this year to serve 33 months in an Ohio prison. His latest full-length release and first since 2024, “Until I Return,” scratches the same itch that his best music does. It’s pain rap, and not the type where he’s singing about demons over a Youngboy YouTube type beat. It’s a permanently sleep-deprived kind of pain rap, without unnecessary theatrics or inspiration arcs. The type that sounds like he’s been legitimately dragged through the concrete to the point that “made it through the rain,” lyrics don’t even sound cliche.
“Nobody Loyal” is one of the standouts because he doesn’t really try to turn any of this into wisdom. Most rappers would frame surviving something like this as motivation, but Quando just sounds disappointed. In people and himself, of course, but mainly in the idea that money was supposed to change anything at all.
Merck, “Go”
The gruff of Bossman Dlow meets the agility of Lil Baby with a Memphis drawl like Young Dolph. Merck has it all. And he can’t wait for you to get that chain so he can take it.