When 37-year-old rapper the Jacka was killed earlier this year in East Oakland, he'd been on the verge of a modest resurgence. The initial arc of his solo career, which began with 2001's Jacka of the Mob Figaz and peaked eight years later with 2009's Tear Gas, was one of the most prolific auteurs of the 2000s. A peerless writer with a distinct sound, a gift for vivid prose, and a powerful moral conscience, his best material received little attention at his apex. (At least on a national level—within the Bay Area and its satellite cities, he's on his way to matching Mac Dre as a regional legend.) After a fallow period in the early 2010s, Jacka released his official Tear Gas follow-up, What Happened to the World, in 2014. Though his momentum had slowed, his writing was as strong as it had ever been. Drought Season 3, his first posthumous release and the third in his series of collaborative albums with fellow Bay Area rapper Berner, proves this was no fluke; there was plenty of gas left in the tank when Jacka's life was tragically cut short this past February.
This tape's prequel, Drought Season 2, was one of the last great albums of the Jacka's initial creative run. But at a time when his career should have been peaking commercially, the internet was wreaking havoc. Album sales were at their nadir, and popular regional stars like Jacka suddenly sat in the shadow of viral sensations like Lil B, whose prescient understanding of meme-marketing gave him a leg up outside his native Bay Area. And while Jacka had long sustained himself by charging for features, the Internet's clear-glass window into the Bay Area scene made it so bootlegs and guest verses buried his official catalog amidst a nebulous cloud of unofficial material.
At the same time, he began to nurse a codeine addiction. Initially, he appreciated syrup's effect on his vocal style, but as time wore on, it began to detach his words and flow from the groove. By the time Drought Season 3 was recorded, his voice no longer felt as present. Its wispier texture seems seconds from evaporating. On the album, this weightlessness detracts only when the Jacka aims for menace, as on the overdriven guitars of "45"; his reflective moments remain convincing, ghosted vocals camouflaging complex emotions and hard-earned wisdom in a dreamlike reverie. Despite this effervescence, his writing is sharp enough to cut glass. It's not just that he doesn't waste words; each statement is saturated with meaning, each deceptively simple lyric charged with purpose, its wider implications left to echo over each successive line.
His passing looms over the proceedings; lyrics recorded before his death take on portentous connotations. On "One Sound", he laments the catch-22 of success: "I just want to make you proud/ But you'd rather see me gunned down." It's a sentiment echoed by Husalah's chorus on "Win": "When you start gettin' money and these suckers start hating/ Sometimes when you win you lose." The Jacka's take on street rap is an urgent one charged by violence, anchored by realism that could verge on the despondent. Underlying it all is a struggle to stay sane in a fallen world, one marked by betrayal ("'Cause niggas got rich and ain't show us how") that is unsparing in its indictment of the wider world's complicity ("Where killing made it safe for y'all to walk around"). A stance of perpetual resistance in the face of the world's cruelty—a cruelty in which he is complicit and compromised—is his eternal subject. That he doesn't fold under its weight, even as the drugs numbed his pain, is a reflection of his abiding Muslim faith, a radicalized race consciousness ("Everywhere I've ever been they treat the blacks, unfair"), and confidence in his art—a trust in truth as a liberating force.
On its musical surface, Drought Season 3 is one of the smoothest rap releases of the year—appropriate for a collaboration with Berner, who has membership in Wiz Khalifa's more commercially-relevant Taylor Gang. The production is lush, colorful, and the dominant rap style throughout its guest-heavy tracklist—give or take Freeway's urgent mania—is one of half-lidded nonchalance. For the uninitiated, this sleek, subtle mood music belies its depth. Expensive-sounding production has long been the m.o. of the Drought Season series. After all, these were the tapes that made Berner's name, an (ostensible) weed-dealing kingpin buying his way into hip-hop with impeccable taste in collaborators and production. But for his part, Berner is no longer the cipher he once was. His flow, which previously relied upon a halting cadence that sounded As If He Were Rapping In Title Case, now rolls off his tongue in a more effortless legato. His lyrics have also deepened in both his attraction to arresting imagery ("I can see my stones glowing in the limousine tint") to an emotional potency that seems, well, Jacka-inspired in its multiplicity of meaning: "We die young but this here forever/ Leave my daughter a letter, don't believe what they tell you."
But while Berner's lyrical contributions here mark a substantial step forward, he's taken a step back in shaping the album's sound, which owes more to Jacka's camp than usual. It's most evident glancing at the record's guest list, which suggests an emotional send-off from his closest friends. For an independent artist working outside the major label system, Jacka's extended crew was built upon strategic alliances, but sustained due to stronger bonds: Ampichino, an Akron, Ohio-based rapper who collaborated with Jacka on two albums as the Devilz Rejects and frequently brought him to perform in the Midwest; Rydah J. Klyde and Husalah, the most active members of Jacka's group the Mob Figaz; Freeway, the sympatico former Roc-A-Fella rapper who bonded with the Jacka over their shared identity as Muslims.
The guests pay their respects in varied ways. On "Drought Season", Joe Blow, the most accomplished artist on Jacka's The Artist record label, unleashes a flurry of syllables in a controlled, laconic style that celebrates Jacka's legacy through breathless formal architecture. "Die Young", a remake of Cormega's street classic "They Forced My Hand", features Oakland legend Richie Rich, a rapper who was signed to Def Jam in the mid-1990s. He addresses his time in the spotlight in a way that could as easily speak to Jacka's own ambivalence to the industry: "I ate with Russell Simmons, so how could I be local?/ But a lot of that bullshit, I just couldn't go for." Cormega appears on "Whole Thang", his understated prose taking on deeper implications: "I was one amongst many, few remain." But it's Jacka's longtime partner Husalah who captures the album's purposeful spirit, on "Win": "As little kids took an oath to this criminal movement/ Hoping this song redeem our souls and wake you up like a rooster." Or perhaps that honor belongs to Jacka himself, who raps on the title track: "I try to end this with who I began with."
Indeed, it's the Jacka's purposeful ideology—scattered jewels throughout the tape which imprint themselves upon the psyche long after the song ends—that makes this a nourishing listen. The album's most revelatory moment comes on the hidden bonus track, "So Much Pain". With a beat that sounds like sun breaking through storm clouds, it opens with an affecting turn from Berner ("Thinking 'bout my mother, I'm screaming 'fuck cancer'") before jumping to one of the most compelling verses of Jacka's career. His truest skill as an artist was the ability to compress a world and worldview onto the head of a pin, and this song is a platonic ideal: opening with a scene of betrayal, he slips to tormented guilt, an indictment of the system, and an affirmation of religious faith that remains as vivid as his street stories: "I know I'm blessed the way you manifest a hopeless mind, into an open eye/ Never seen a god in the open sky, but I read the signs so I know you are, right there, unseen like the air you feel/ On your skin, unseen like the evil djinn, you know I kneel."
His verse ends in what may as well be his career's statement of purpose ("All I try to do is make it pop, somewhere/ All my fallen soldiers, dead or locked, you'll live again"). The effect is overwhelming, a moment of crystalline clarity, a flash of light. And as suddenly the light recedes, as Carey Stacks, a Seattle protege, returns to the here-and-now, to his immediate vicinity, to the concrete threats of the world in front of him: "Two feet on the ground, both eyes open."
