Toward the end of Mozzy’s latest album, over a synth and sax-laced beat, he admits, “Day in, day out I would beg for this life/Lot of misfortune that came with this life.” In the moment, he sounds at once grim and grateful. After 30 years on this earth, he isn’t shameless about his misfortunes—some of which were carried out by his own hand—but he’s not apologetic either. It seems his only regret is that his life may have come at too high a cost, and on 1 Up Top Ahk, he offers the receipts.
It opens with a recorded message from a club owner attempting to shut down a performance at his venue. “I know most of them are thugs, but this dude’s got a problem with guns,” the owner says, insisting they return his call. Guns were part of the reason the Sacramento rapper found himself locked up in 2014, but that’s only one chapter of a story far more complex than the “thugs and guns” cliche gangster rappers (really, any rapper) are reduced to. 1 Up Top Ahk peels back the layers alongside a carefully selected cast of features from Boosie, Lil Durk, and Jay Rock. Though the features broaden the perspectives, the prolific Mozzy is the unequivocal star here.
Sparing no details, the album unfolds like the diary of a man haunted by a past he’s trying to outrun. There’s a West Coast tinge to most of his production from his longtime collaborator June on the Beat, all bassy and funky, but there’s no audible sunshine here. This isn’t a man who needs sympathy—just an open ear as willing to listen without believing themselves a judge and jury. On “Sleep Walkin,” Mozzy confesses, “I miss my brother Deezy/Only if them bullets grazed ’em/Wasn’t no hatred in my heart until that happened/That’s what changed me.”
Rap has a way of humanizing those whom society has rendered deplorable or altogether invisible. Where others have chosen glorification as their mode of resisting—destructive trauma tucked beneath a club banger, sounding like a good time—Mozzy avoids that. Nothing on this record, not the production nor the tenderly sung hooks, overshadows what it is he has to say. He counts on his vulnerability to compel the album forward; his jagged voice and clear-eyed lyrics are pensive and pain-filled. He’s seen a lifetime’s worth of tragedy, and as the title of “Take It Up With God” suggests, sometimes the Lord feels like the only refuge in some of the worst storms life has to offer. Set to a harmonizing vocal and percussion, the hook and verses are as much a genuflection for mothers of the fallen as they are an attempt to come to terms with the fact their loved ones are never coming back.
“It’s like I’ve got a shoebox of obituaries, and they’re all young,” Mozzy told The Sacramento Bee last year. As the Reaper lurks in 1 Up Top Ahk’s shadows, Mozzy often appeals to a higher power. “Took a seat in church/My family told me it don’t hurt to try/It’s therapeutic for you baby/It don’t hurt to cry,” he raps on “M.I.P. Jacka,” an homage to the Bay Area rapper who was killed two years ago. The Jacka, himself, features as well over aptly somber, sparse production.
Death and religion become uneasy bedfellows in the streets, but as is the natural order, where something dies, something else is given life. In this way, there’s a restorative element to the album that makes it feel like the end of a troubled beginning. The artwork is the mugshot from Mozzy’s first case as an adult, a tribute to the trials that ultimately built up to this last trip to San Quentin and the one he says saved him. In between, he had a prolific run, dropping upwards of 26 projects over six years—12 of them last year alone. But he slowed it down (only two prior this year), and this slower pace pays off. No longer the villain, he’s become an anti-hero whose done all the wrong things for the right reasons finally ready to turn a corner, and it’s hard not to cheer him on. 1 Up Top Ahk elevates the stories from those who have been silenced. As much as the album deals with struggles in the streets and the trauma that comes with it, it’s also about loyalty and brotherhood and pride in a world that says you’re undeserving and the refusal to break. It’s about someone who made it to where many others didn’t—in rap or otherwise—and, as Mozzy says himself, someone who deserves to shine.
