Ezale is a human emoji. He’s always smiling, dancing, or on fire in some way that swirls his thin braids around. When he burst onto the rap scene in 2013 behind “5 Minutes of Funktown”—an intersection between nostalgic beats from Whodini and Rick James and dumb Oakland swagger—he felt less like a rapper and more like a giddy tour guide. When he collected that world-building origin story and other great singles “Foreal Foreal” and “Too High,” he put on the appropriate costume and titled his 2013 mixtape Drug Funnie, a riff on the Nickelodeon show “Doug.”
On the cover of his collaboration album with DJ Fresh, The Tonite Show, Ezale and Fresh share detailed, slightly grotesque Adult Swim-type caricatures. DJ Fresh is an old-fashioned DJ who loves making music. He crisscrosses influences into a funky, pastel patchwork that reflects the diversity of Oakland and growing up surrounded by every type of music (never mind that DJ Fresh is actually an East Coast transplant). He builds common ground between Bay Area slap and G-funk through ’80s sounds, connecting the dots from soft rock to quiet storm, adult contemporary pop, disco, and new jack swing. While some of Fresh’s Tonite Show albums have drawn attention by featuring artists who would seem incongruent (like Gary, Indiana’s Freddie Gibbs and Houston’s Trae tha Truth), not since D-Lo has Fresh worked with someone as unique and compelling as Ezale, a talent complementary to his own.
DJ Fresh productions are a perfect stage for feeling out the sound of words, and while Ezale doesn’t lift off into the gumbo of slang that Bay Area rappers are sometimes known for, his personality is similarly airy and charming, the guy at the party who wants to ask you if you got any pills, not if your friend is single. “Used to bust down zits, now I ship out packs,” he offers on “Stop Come On,” and it’s a great, self-deprecating image and sneaky clever, a dynamic that a lot of rappers, even ones who are trying to be funny, fail miserably at. He’s never hateful or mean, because Ezale is just knocking words back and forth until he finds a joke he likes or a bit of wordplay he can slide into (“I need green bags like Sun Chips/I can’t afford to go to Rita off some dumb shit,” from the introspective “Got the Game From the OG’s”)
True to most Tonite Show records, this one moves at a clip. Fellow Oakland producer Hawk Beatz takes the reins on a few songs to switch it up, most notably by sampling another Bay Area figure Jocelyn Enriquez and her jam “A Little Bit of Ecstasy,” finding Fresh’s bloodline within the slinky beats of ’90s electro. Ezale gets quietly poignant, breaking the fourth wall to hit you with, “My brother coulda made it to the NBA/But it didn’t go his way/But don’t worry, one day,” and “Livin’ life in the Town make it hard to pray/cause they say a stray bullet took my brother away.”
Everything that works on the sub-half-hour* Tonite Show* is contained in “We Want Some Pussy,” a terrific end-of-summer song that prominently samples 2 Live Crew but takes the energy level down a few notches, not even riding a swing-for-the-fences beat that you might conceive while thinking of marrying Miami bass with Oakland slap. It’s this kind of subtle stylistic switch-up that is so compelling—how many different ways can these guys convince you they want some drugs, they want to fuck, they want to party—and how many different ways can it sound great? The answer to both: a lot.
