Rio Da Yung OG raps like a teacher who has gathered all their students on the rug for storytime. It just so happens that the Flint, Michigan-based 25-year-old’s tales all concern drug dealing, drug addiction, and paranoia. He raps over anxious, piano-driven production similar to Detroit hip-hop, chronicling his past with reflective anecdotes that may or may not be lies: the time when his uncle took away his football as a kid and told him to sell drugs instead; when he ran into the guy who stole his bike back in elementary school, so he shot him in the leg; when his uncle was sentenced to life in jail, but received clemency from Barack Obama.
Last year, Rio Da Yung OG’s hectic punchline-based rap found the ears of longtime Detroit staple Peezy. Before Peezy left to serve a jail sentence, he took Rio under his wing. Rio switched his focus from running around the streets of Flint to music, but he had legal troubles of his own, and soon, drug charges landed him on house arrest. The isolation turned into a blessing, allowing him to flood the internet with his chaotic and line-crossing take on the Detroit sound for the second half of 2019.
His bedroom recordings were so colorful and brutal that the only reasonable response was to laugh at the absurdity: “Meet the plug, take everything while his son watching/Swear to God I ain’t stick that nigga up my gun robbed him,” he raps on “Legendary,” his biggest song to date. Filming his music videos on the same front lawn and rooms throughout his home, he became one of the premier street rappers in the Midwest in months.
Rio keeps this momentum with City on My Back, 15 songs of straight shit-talking over funky beats that could have been made in any year since 2008. The appeal of Rio is simply in listening to him talk. Every line is detailed, as if pulled from a script: “Don’t say shit when I cook dope, I think the kitchen wired,” he says on the 50 Cent-sampling “Window Shopper.” He gives us a peek into his daily life on “Listen To Me”: “It’s nine in the morning I just woke up/Before I make an egg sandwich, I cook dope up.” His raps can go from dark comedy to bleak in one line: “Scared to close my eyes, I might die, I drunk a lot of syrup,” he says on “2020 Freestyle.”
Even Rio’s missteps are never flatout failures. “City on My Back” is one of Rio’s first attempts at a hook, and it’s weak for sure, but his verse more than makes up for it: “Just a sold zip, he say it smell fresh that’s cause it really soap/Yeah, I’m a dirty person,” he cracks. Here are the instructions to “Dance Moves,” Rio’s attempt at crafting a viral dance challenge: “Look man, get on the ground, hump the floor, act like you fucking a bitch.”
But Rio doesn’t need hooks or dance challenges. Listening to him rap on City on My Back is like being engrossed in an audiobook on a long drive. Whether he’s playing a dice game in Louis Vuitton, pouring a girl a cup of E&J and telling her that it’s Henneessy, or selling a customer fake pills, few can tell a story better than Rio.
