After spending almost the entirety of 2017 at Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles for unlawful possession of a firearm, one of the West Coast’s most exciting and innovative rappers, Drakeo the Ruler, was arrested again in early 2018, due to an alleged connection to a 2016 concert shooting. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has come after Drakeo’s entire Stinc Team crew with trumped-up conspiracy charges, the kind that were written into law in order to prosecute mobsters but are now mostly used as a loophole to go after rappers with alleged gang connections. Though Drakeo was found not guilty of murder and attempted murder, he remains behind bars; despite the acquittal, the District Attorney’s office has decided to refile several conspiracy-related charges in what’s clearly become an institutional vendetta against an artist who hasn’t been afraid to speak out and push back with the platform he has. Free Drakeo is Drakeo’s first project since 2017’s Cold Devil, as well as the first since his horrific and seemingly endless incarceration began.
The album is culled mostly from scattered loosies, released online from 2016 to 2018. The criminal case has only raised his profile—the album opens with a long supercut of “Free Drakeo” shout-outs from the past two years, before Drakeo directly addresses the intermingling of fame and severe misfortune on “Crime Stoppers,” the only entirely new studio recording on the album (“Crime Stoppers made me famous”). Free Drakeo is bookended by two freestyles, delivered over the phone from prison, that express the kind of self-reflection Drakeo has been forced to do during his time in solitary: “Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill/The type of books a nigga read only in jail.”
The compilation charts the evolution of his career in reverse, from something of a nationally-recognized folk hero, to the reigning monarch of his hometown scene, to a lesser-known local favorite itching to break out. The oldest track included is the song responsible for that breakout is “Mr. Get Dough,” a piano-driven Mustard production, featuring Choice & RJMrLa. The track is very of its time, only a few degrees away from 2 Chainz’s 2012 track “I’m Different,” with a club-friendly nursery rhyme rhythm that could be played by Tom Hanks jumping on a giant keyboard.
Since then, Drakeo’s flow has developed a twisty complexity, the kind of hurried wordiness preferred by the current wave of rappers coming out of both California and Detroit, from Blueface to BabyTron. He’s racked up co-signing remixes from artists across the country—Shy Glizzy, Lil Yachty, Danny Brown—but this is Drakeo’s first full-length project to feature recruits from outside his home region on the roster: Maxo Kream turns in a verse on “Crime Stoppers,” and the Bay Area is represented by SOB X RBE on “I Could Never” and Yatta on “Fuck Being Humble.” It’s not surprising to hear Drakeo link up with Detroit natives like Rio Da Yung OG on “Black Holocaust” and BandGang Javar on “Touchin”—Detroit is maybe the only other place producing rappers precise and technically proficient enough to keep up with Drakeo bar-for-bar.
His delivery is in the tradition of E-40 and Suga Free, but Drakeo lacks their colorful bounce and cartoonishness—his voice is a little more monotone, with a sandpapered edge that makes the playfulness of his rhymes hard to catch on the first listen. Drakeo’s immaculately packaged bars are more “magical realist” in their writing, imaginative and expressionist with the choice of analogies but still cloaked in grit: “I’m not with all that sneak dissing/Chopper rippin’ off limbs and all type of teeth missing/Grim reaper, street sweeper, boy, I'm knee-deep in/Green and red beams like I got these for Christmas.”
Free Drakeo is practical in purpose, packaged together to satiate an emerging desire for more music from Drakeo and to assert his continued presence in the marketplace. But it’s also politically motivated, an album that exists as much to raise awareness about Stinc Team’s continued persecution as it does to turn uncollected singles into a streamable commodity. Drakeo is, after all, effectively a political prisoner, the latest example to be made by a carceral society intent on exacting the cruelest revenge against Black men who find success on their own terms. Though it might not offer much fresh material for the already initiated, Free Drakeo has value as a rallying cry, a call to action not just on the part of Drakeo, but of every incarcerated individual in this country who doesn’t have a microphone or streaming platform to reach us from.
