A couple minutes into The Undisputed Truth, Drakeo the Ruler asks you to skip backwards through time. “Let’s pretend it’s 2016,” he says, before conjuring images of Mercedes SUVs filled with guns and police officers’ badge numbers disseminated through Instagram DMs. The scene is rendered with Drakeo’s typically chilling wit: he implores the listener to understand that he’s “emotionally scarred” before grinning through his teeth about his enemies ducking behind sedans when they see him coming. The preposterousness is the point. But just as he’s set the action in motion, there’s a pivot in tone: “Oh Lord,” he sighs, suddenly bored by the B-movie climax he’s scripted. “Here go this shit again.”
The Undisputed Truth is the second full-length solo album following Drakeo’s assassination in December 2021. Pulled from the remarkably prolific sessions after his release from jail 13 months prior, the material here is of a piece with the four solo LPs released between his plea deal and eventual death. (During this time Drakeo and his brother, Ralfy the Plug, also recorded a crisp, apocalyptic collaborative album, A Cold Day In Hell.) This final period is marked by a voice more frayed and fried than before, quicker to dissolve into a true whisper, still nimble but evidently burdened. He’d grown more syntactically direct even as his real life became more complex. While the hard drives are reportedly still well-stocked with unreleased songs, The Undisputed Truth feels like the culmination of what should have been a generational talent’s early-middle period.
From the time he emerged in the mid-2010s, Drakeo showed a keen ability to source beats that both drove toward his own formal aims and could be arranged into starkly coherent projects. At first, this style—dubbed “nervous music”—seemed like the natural extension of what had been happening in Los Angeles rap for the half-decade prior. It took the handmade minimalism of the jerkin’ era—during which Drakeo and his friends earned a little notoriety as dancers—and inverted its playful, pastel energy into something menacing. Its tempos and careening structures evoked rap from Michigan and the Bay Area; the instrumentation echoed the ratchet music that had begun to rattle out of L.A.’s strip clubs. All of which meant that even when a beat located a particularly irresistible bounce, it had a disquieting effect on the listener, making them lean closer to the speaker as Drakeo muttered, in post-post-Suga Free tap dance flows, about the danger he kept clocking in his peripheral vision.
After his release, he made subtle but fascinating tweaks to that sound palette. By the time he was making So Cold I Do Em 2, the final record he’d issue while he was alive, a certain iciness had overtaken it; it was as if an extra dimension had been added to the songs, and that dimension was simply dread. And so, while the release dates of that record and this one hold special significance—Drakeo was born on December 1 and liked to drop music as a celebration; now, it is also an unavoidable reminder of his death—he has also, somehow, answered a question too few people had been asking: How can one make the definitive L.A. winter hip-hop album?
What has remained constant through the slow evolution of Drakeo’s taste in production is his economy of language, his rhythmic precision, and his commitment to inscrutability. He had a collagist’s ear for language, pulling strange phraseology from contemporary social media and, seemingly, 1950s comic books. (This is a man who once wrote a song called “Pow Right In the Kisser” and, here, threatens foes on one called “Bop Bop Bleed Em,” which precedes “Archie Bunker” and “Stella Got Her Groove Back.”) On The Undisputed Truth, things are smashed to “smithereens,” Drakeo has two instances of the phrase “holy moly!” and one “no siree, Bob,” and at one point he mimics the Road Runner.
Some rappers would use the incongruity between that sort of language and the often violent subject matter to unsettle listeners through simple juxtaposition. What Drakeo was doing was more slippery, and more rewarding. His trial was one of the most prominent in a recent rash of cases that treated rap lyrics as evidence of violent crime and conspiracy. The racist underpinnings of this are obvious and well-documented. Black artists are not allowed the poetic license, or simply the imagination, extended to others; genre-convention lines in rap songs are taken as confessions of real-world guilt in a way a scene from a Scorsese gangster movie would never be.
Outside of court, Drakeo’s attorney often cited “Shoot a Baby,” a bit of blindingly obvious satire, a video in which prop guns are pointed at dolls. Who could take such a song literally? But again and again, detectives for the state argued that lines in songs about unspecified guns were to be understood as references to specific murder weapons; that slang words for sex or money were in fact coded calls to arms; that Drakeo’s music was not intended as an artistic pursuit at all, but was a mere gang recruitment tool.
These arguments became the subject of much of Drakeo’s music, which is unsurprising. But it also provided him with a new, delightfully slippery internal logic—or illogic, an incentive to obfuscate his meaning and challenge listeners to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. This began in earnest on Thank You for Using GTL, the album he recorded, with the producer JoogSzn, over the phone from Men’s Central Jail in downtown L.A. In addition to being a staggering display of technique—Drakeo nails the tightrope timing and askance parentheticals of each verse in a series of unbroken takes—GTL ends with a song whose hook goes: “It might sound real, but it’s fictional/I love that my imagination gets to you.”
When he was out, he began to provoke the bullpens of cops and detectives who, he had learned during the trial, rack up overtime while on endless scrolls through rappers’ Instagram feeds. The Undisputed Truth opens with an eerily poised song called “Perfect Eulogy” in which he boasts that he could have someone killed in exchange for “a promo post.” If rap music, Instagram, and Instagram posts about rap music are going to be read as terroristic threats, the argument seems to go, we might as well wield them as such.
Throughout the album, Drakeo pokes at that increasingly porous line between the real and the fictional with superb formal vision. The clarity and concision of his language in the opening six bars of “Bop Bop Bleed Em” makes it all the more chilling when he breaks form; every single line on the Icewear Vezzo duet “Rerock the Hook” could in fact be looped four times as a chorus, and yet each seems to have come off the top of his head. On “Vince McMahon,” Drakeo lapses into one of his most original modes, seeming to be amused and astonished by himself in real time. His asides, as ever, are singular—a long run of braggadocio on the excellent 03 Greedo collaboration “Not The 1” is interrupted by worries about a particular SUV’s paint color that seem to shake Drakeo to his core.
The Undisputed Truth can be dizzying, both for its sheer technical wizardry and for the aforementioned ways he prods those First Amendment questions about his intent. But then, at once, that posture falls away. “Lately, all I can think about is violence,” he raps at the very beginning of the penultimate song, “I’m the Reason.” Placed elsewhere—earlier on the album, on a sunnier beat—that same line might play as yet another taunt for detectives. But here it is an admission—one that takes on far more gravity after his death. “Reason” is followed by an outro where Drakeo expresses his bemusement at the poor work ethic and lack of business savvy exhibited by his peers. Rappers need to drop music frequently these days, he says. “If I decide to stop making music, there’s going to be 50 me’s,” he says. To hear the pervasiveness of his influence over contemporary rap, he’s right. But these are copies of copies, to diminishing returns; the genuine article is impossible to recreate.
