"Bankin' off this rap shit / forever with these flows and this Peyote Cactus"
Mescal has been my crew and I’s
vision of the future of Latin L.A. hip-hop since he whupped our collective
asses in a massive performance contest in West
Covina in 2015 and started booking us for various
shows in the year subsequent. He and his crew EOTR have kept boom-bap fresh
while showcasing diverse progressive professional music in major venues with
top-acts like Murs and Felipe Esparza from East Los to Europe .
One rolls up to the automated gate at
their First Street
studio in Boyle Heights and it feels like the Rebels on
Yavin IV waving in allied freighters. After getting lost like a dweeb in their
nondescript hallways Penner and other EOTR homies kindly point me in the
direction of Mescal’s studio even though I’ve been here like 4 times before at
least. An honest and communicative collaborator, Mescal engineers a recording
of a song I’m working on produced by Yohalmo for my first solo album. Both of
us familiar with these motions, we have a satisfactory set of layers within 45
minutes and have time to get some pho and visit the dispensary Zzay works at.
"keep it to yourself / if it's negative..."
The
large pho combo is fire and Mescal dishes on how busy he is trying to achieve
and represent for his city and families. He’s engineering, recording new music, making a video for every
song on his new album to name just a few things on his plate. He says he’s shooting the next morning with a guy who
was working an a Hopsin video while we were in the stu. His latest video, “Peyote
Cactus” having garnered most of 10,000 views in the first month of it's release is a good indicator that he’s not just saying shit. “People
don’t have attention spans anymore and that’s okay. You don’t gotta hype up
some shit for 6 weeks before you drop it. – ‘got a project coming out’ – okay? Cool?
Just give it to people. Just give it to them. No need to sit on it forever.”
Zzay brought some sunshine into a rainy day and rolled us all a blunt while
we visited her shop and caught up about video shoots and newly discovered
mutual friends. She’s making visuals for her stellar new 4-song cycle producedby NugLife Solstice. As someone who’s
followed Zzay from the outset of her recording endeavors I’ll always have a
soft spot for the spirited growing young woman who rapped and sang her real
thoughts over hip-hop soul as she found herself but the Solstice EP finds her a woman so confident in her groove that it’s
a Throne now; NugLife is a wildly melodic producer but knows how to make
productions that keep the performer front and center. With more upbeat ideas and spiritually conscious lyrics from EOTR's resident songstress than ever before, the EP goes down easier
and more smoothly than any of her other projects, a smart snack of posi-neo-soul
made with utmost craftsmanship; both artists are in their pocket.
Blunted back at the lab, Viva Mescal slid me a copy of his new album. Now
his Weird Turn Pro LP from 2017 is a master’s
class in keeping an album one coherent mood but this new album Long Live the Peyote is my favorite
record from Mescal since the fevered and political Strange Rumblings in Aztlan. With swifter ease than ever Mescal
bridges hip-hop posturing with grown man example setting, barring out spazzing
with hook-driven songwriting, psychedelic politics with working class
grounding. With beats from Rokem, Global Getdown and more, the album bangs and
unfolds cinematically- Mescal’s ponderings and pontifications about drugs like
lean and peyote weave organically into references to the Latin culture’s agua
frescas and nopales that he grew up with. Before we parted I think we had a
moment of kindred business- seeing someone in front of us who kept as busy as
we did. I see it seldom and sometimes it’s nice just to be reminded that you’re
not the only insane one who is trying to balance so much. He gave me valuable
advice on the album he was helping me with as well as another project I have
coming in the Spring and we promised to follow-up with each other about both as
well as music we had mentioned to each other for listening recommendations- I’m
still curious as to what he’ll think of At the Drive In, Mars Volta and No
Malice albums I sent him links to.
Greaseball from Strange People,
Herbalistics, and lately Cookie World Productions has long been my favorite
Inland Emcee and I don’t say that lightly. I recognize that Vision is the
illest freestyler in the region, I recognize that Cam Archer’s power levels are
unimpeachable, I recognize the versatility of Brandon the Wizard and the battle chops of Epyk
Saga so I’m not claiming my preference is objectivity I’m just being honest
about my tastes. On the way home from Boyle Heights I decided to stop in San Dimas
and catch up with the man once known on the other side of the I.E. as Johnny
Greaseball.
“Everybody my age learned the name of the game and I think that we all want to die”
Between the aforementioned Zzay and
Greasy B, I don’t know whose journey of change surprises me more…as I type this
out I think it’s Greaseball’s because Zzay’s felt gradual and step by step
whereas Greaseball’s life shifts seem even more volatile. I remember hanging
out with him in dusty garages and backhouses in San
Bernardino and Riverside
throughout 2014, 2015 and 2016. Reckless swings through downtown with his drunk
troublesome exes, anxious blunts with ne’er do wells in alleys….visiting him at
what many call the TrapHouse in San Dimas
was different. A beautiful home sheltering a makeshift artist commune, various
beanie-topped sweater-clad tall men made a veritable vegan feast in the kitchen while
Greaseball and I smoked glass pipe bowls of herb in front of his computer and Xbox, showing eachother demos. Young women with their facially modified friends
brought in cannabis cannisters and twelve-packs of Stella Artois . One such person said she used to
hang out with my sister in my old Fontana
home to my stoned surprise. Grease talked about embracing progressive
philosophies that he used to seem somewhat distant from when he was just a
thunder-voiced street urchin battle-ready scrappy Riverside MC. On songs like “The
Pain” from his new album The Alligator King Grease shows that his values
have changed- he now walks through life with a deep almost burdensome empathy
for everyone’s struggles; every stanza is not a tank filled with internal rhymes
designed to melt your face but rather with melancholy limerick that often
devolves into tourettes like spasms of coping mechanisms for the agony of
letting things stack. Even when he does spaz on this song, it’s to show a man
fraying as he grasps at his values like a sweater being ripped from him and not
an MC battle like display of spittery. He
grapples with the loss of his father at a young age in new ways yet compared to
the hagiographic tracks about his father in his past oeuvre. Now he complicates
the picture of his fallen patriarch as he discusses the struggles his mother
bore for the family growing up. On “Goodybe
River ” he says goodbye for now to his
hometown of Riverside , singing wistfully and
hopefully about his current Pomona-Claremont village frequenting San Dimas- dwelling paradigm. Given the inter-genre collaborations and production company community
he’s developed with Birote the Musical and other Cookie World artists, who can blame
him? Rock artists and the always welcome Hepthy sound equally natural on this indie hip-hop masterpiece of an album.On "I think I do", Grease embraces the idea of free will and gets positively philosophical. Grease was fresh off of a night at the Smell in LA rocking a packed house when
we caught up; also right around his birthday, like Mescal. I told him I was
truly envious of his new life-art-friends arrangement. That I had long sought
such a treehouse refuge in my own 20s and that I was happy he had the chance to
truly enjoy and expand on such an opportunity. He gave me some kind feedback on
a song I had about just those very topics. I asked him if he'd heard Mescal's new one and he said not yet. He told me a story about how he saw that his last album Happiness to Me was on a Snapchat story shared by EOTR some months back and he laughed and thought "gotcha!" as he saw the image scroll by on his feed. "Good," I thought, "Greaseball and EOTR should be hearing eachother as they are each the most cutting edge progressive boom-bap Latinos of their respective regions..."
His new album haunts me- for me it
represents working class Latinos of my generation finally bumping against the
realities of the limitations of our aspirations. Here he is existing in a
situation I used to fantasize about and he drops a 45 minute long document as
to the inescapable pain of life when you’ve been trained to feel inadequate by
a too-often too-narrow-minded society. Here he is to say the pros and cons are
just as balanced in his circumstance and perhaps even more starkly and intense.
His Gator-King persona alternates between being out of fucks to give and being
paralyzed with sympathy for his fellow misfits and lovers. His defensiveness
slowly gives way to his seeing all of our souls behind surprisingly earnest
eyes.
Mescal and Greaseball are both
sensitive thoughtful Capricorn poets who have built communities they’ve nestled
themselves within. I relate more to Greaseball’s claustrophobic paintings
because of where I am from but visions like Mescal’s give us I.E. kids an idea
of what we’re looking for when we stare towards the coast and press down on the
gas. I thought of both of them and the friends I’ve been lucky enough to meet
and know through and around them as I made my way home, transferring from the
605 North to the 210 East, chasing the massive distant moon.
Tristan "Tanjint Wiggy" Acker is staff writer for JooseBoxx, a youth hip-hop and poetry tutor, and member of the Inland Empire nerdcore hip-hop group the West Coast Avengers. Catch more of their work at westcoastavengers.com, follow Tristan on Twitter @Tanjint or e-mail him at tristanacker@gmail.com
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