“No Choice,” the third song from Mozzy’s new EP, Spiritual Conversations, opens: “You don’t wanna live like this, let it sink in.” The line is a callback to the title track from Bladadah, one of the Sacramento rapper’s handful of breakout moments: “It’s deeper than a punchline or trying to sound lyrical/You don’t wanna live like this, my life difficult.” Mozzy’s music, typified by last year’s excellent 1 Up Top Ahk, has long meshed menace with a moral center, where the violence is unapologetic but not unexamined. Spiritual and psychological trauma seem to guide his songwriting, but they appear most frequently as subtext, or as codas on extended narratives. Spiritual Conversations brings those concerns to the foreground. While none of these six songs would be out of place on any other Mozzy record, hearing them arranged here, one after another, serves not only as an interesting aside in his catalog but a suggestion for alternate readings of his previous works.
Mozzy was raised in Sacramento’s Oak Park district, the grandson of a Black Panther, and surrounded by Bloods. He’s been rapping since he was a preteen in the late ’90s, but in the past four years has begun to amass a formidable following, tentacling from Northern California down the coast and through the rap internet. (Earlier this year, he was tapped to appear on the Black Panther soundtrack after Kendrick Lamar quoted him in a Grammys acceptance speech.) He drops music at a remarkable pace, but unlike many of his digital-native contemporaries, he organizes nearly all of his music into traditionally formatted LPs and EPs, which has its benefits but makes it less inviting for die-hards to pick and choose and rearrange songs to build narrative and counter-narratives about the artist’s work. Spiritual Conversations is a compelling listen simply for the fact that it seems to be in conversation with Mozzy’s larger catalog.
The songs themselves are emotionally balanced and lushly produced. On “In My Prayers,” the rap success is a little hollow—it “don’t excite” his mom and does even less to sway the judge. Mozzy’s a dexterous writer, and at times the real-world concerns melt down—giving way to tightly wound word games—then crystallize again at the end of the riddle: “We do the Dolce Gabbana down to the drawers/Google the goon, bodies/They poppin’ up on the blogs.” Think a W. Bush-era Cam’ron with no taste for paparazzi. But instead of moving on to the next fragment, he lets the killing breathe, rapping, “Murder be justifiable when it’s probable cause/But that don’t make up for the losses/Not at all.” It’s a concise reading of a worldview that allows for incredible violence but doesn’t deny the trauma that comes with it.
Spiritual Conversations is best condensed in the hook of “Who I Am”: “They could never live how I live/This shit trife, but it is what it is.” For as deeply as he burrows into the mechanics of murder plots or the soul-wrenching guilt in their aftermath, he tends to write and rap from a place of control, as if he’s a therapist recapping his patient’s manic account. The EP is not an ideal point of entry into Mozzy’s catalog, but as the spotlight brightens and he looks to flesh out his public persona, it’s a more than a worthwhile addendum.
