To hear ShooterGang Kony tell it, he never thought about rapping until he was sitting in a jail cell. The 21-year-old native of Sacramento’s Oak Park was first sentenced to probation at 13 and began bouncing in and out of lockup a couple years later; his music, buoyant but threatening, sometimes recalls these jail cells as portals to hell, on other songs as minor inconveniences. On Red Paint Reverend, his excellent new album, Kony is meaner and funnier than ever, but also delves deeper into the psychic pain of those incarcerations, rapping evocatively about the way he would dial number after number on the jail phones that led him to his friends’ voicemails, as he imagined the fun they were having without him. That he does this without surrendering any of the freewheeling chaos of his early work makes Reverend a marked leap forward for one of California’s most exciting young rap artists.
The cliché goes that by the turn of the century, major-label rap albums were built by rubric: four songs for “the streets,” three for “the club,” two for “the girls,” and so on. Still today, many artist backload their albums with their more somber, most overtly personal songs, as a way to give the records a veneer of seriousness and a sense of emotional heft. Kony has always been a little more slippery in this regard. His album from last summer, Second Hand Smoke, opens with a strange two-step: first a minor-key elegy called “Off the Dribble,” which is followed by “Charlie,” a song that’s bright and breezy but still—to be absolutely clear—about weapons. The forward motion on Kony’s albums comes from variations in tone and execution rather than in subject matter. This means that the sober songs are injected with unsettling humor and the bouncy ones are girded by murder.
Kony doesn’t foreground the technical aspects of rapping, but he’s more than capable: see the way he finds the beat’s pocket on the intro as the drums fall in around the 80-second mark, then compare that to songs like “Veteran’s Day,” where he gestures toward the jagged flows that his contemporaries nearer the Bay and down in Los Angeles have been using, the ones that always teeter on the back edge of the measure, threatening to fall off.
While he never gets quite as unmoored from the beat as AzChike or the guys in SOB x RBE, Kony’s slightly muted version of the style puts his work in conversation with other California rappers––and in turn highlights the comparatively classicist streak to his writing. The most affecting song on Reverend is “A Sinner’s Story,” where he recalls those jail phones and talks about the rapid psychological shift that happens between pulling your first trigger and examining your first exit wound. It is also a shock to hear someone whose writing is so often qualified with winks and asides rap as naked a four-bar passage as:
Ever had your close friend put your name in the case?Wanna kill him, but you can’t, ‘cause you loved him under the hate.Ever had your close friend coil into a snake?He was shedding in my house, it was right in front of my face.
Between “A Sinner’s Story” and “Dearly Departed,” a duet with Oak Park elder statesman Mozzy, Reverend showcases Kony’s ability to write straightforwardly about the grim realities of life in Sacramento. But as mentioned, he’s just as likely to cover the same subject matter with a smile on his face. At various points on the album Kony cracks jokes about industry people telling him to change his stage name (“But I still sleep with the thing”) and about someone who could end up snitching (“Cops had him singing and pointing like it’s the ‘70s”). And then there’s the delayed cause-and-effect of him rapping, on one song, “I prefer the Glock over the chopper, I like to know who I be shooting” and then, on the next track, “I hit his homie on a fluke––he was actually kind of cool,” shrugging off the latter murder like a cackling Oak Park Chekhov. By the time Reverend settles into its slick closer, “Street Talk,” Kony is cemented as a fresh voice for California: of his generation but informed by his elders, untangling the tragedies of his life when he isn’t too busy having fun.
