G Perico hails from deep in South Central Los Angeles—east of the Forum, west of the Watts Towers. On his breakthrough mixtape, Shit Don’t Stop, the blue-draped, Jheri-curled rapper bounces between L.A. landmarks real and imagined, haunting the bar at the Ritz-Carlton on Olympic, surveying his subjects from a stoplight on Western. More importantly, Perico channels some of California’s most colorful legends (Suga Free, Too $hort, DJ Quik, even Eazy-E), and rolls those influences into one sneering, swaggering whole. To that end, Shit Don’t Stop follows YG’s Still Brazy in providing a natural endpoint for decades of disparate rap threads that unspooled up and down the 5 freeway.
Perico’s most obvious analogue from recent years is 100s, the Berkeley rapper whose Ice Cold Perm mixtape and (especially) IVRY EP pushed pimp rap back into vogue. But 100s (whose music has mutated and who now goes by his given name, Kossisko) treated the profession as something abstract, a fever dream fueled by pager beeps and curl activator. By contrast, Shit Don’t Stop pulls the pimp into real life—not exactly an everyman, but a member of a larger, sometimes grim world. On “Million Dolla Mission,” he’s not above the law, but he makes it work for him anyway: “They booked me at the station, but I ain’t never stay/I’m a real boss, all my bail money’s paid.”
In that vein, the record’s closing song, “Streets Don’t Love Us,” is a lament for murdered friends and indicted peers, lurking Feds and nascent third strikes. It grounds Perico’s work by detailing all the forces conspiring against him; it also colors the more joyous songs by warning that the “blue Pumas, all suede” might disappear at midnight. All of this is bolstered by a story that’s already entered L.A. rap lore: earlier this year, Perico was shot in front of a recording studio in South Central. Instead of acquiescing to a lengthy hospital stay, he opted for a crude cleaning of the wound in his hip, and made it to his scheduled performance that night, blood still dripping down his leg.
And yet Shit Don’t Stop is a potent reminder that, despite the way gangsta rap is caricatured in the press and by detractors, the genre can be relentlessly fun. On “Nothin’ but Love,” Perico raps about jumping bail as if he was going to the gym; on “Dream Nigga,” he threatens to steal your girl and make her bring food stamps to pay for dinner. The second verse of “I Got Business” details a 4 a.m. encounter, where Perico reluctantly has sex with a woman (“I ain’t even ‘bout to hit it long/I just wanna give you yours and then get mine”) and then chastises her for not being courteous enough to call beforehand.
Though he’s a capable, occasionally exceptional songwriter, G Perico’s strongest asset is his voice. It clearly owes a debt to Quik and Suga Free, but it’s employed in a series of modern cadences (see: the first verse in “Dream Nigga,” where he slips into the same flow Nef the Pharaoh has been resurrecting upstate). He doesn’t break the structure of bars the way Suga Free did, but he’s nimble enough that he can hit technical passages while keeping his overwhelming cool.
Given that sort of smart, selective reverence, G Perico casts himself as a torchbearer who isn’t all that concerned about torchbearing. These are songs for long, sweltering cookouts, perilous house parties, and the maddening freeway trips in between. (As aggressively regional as Shit Don’t Stop is, it does take a stab at Master P’s “I’m Bout It, Bout It,” which, while most famously repurposed by Dipset in the early 2000s, has also been a testing ground of sorts for young rappers like Florida’s Robb Bank$). In a crowded—and excellent—year for West coast hip-hop, G Perico stands out as one of the most promising newcomers.
