In a summer declared “lost” by partygoers and beach-dwellers, 03 Greedo barely felt the sun on his face. The transcendent L.A. rapper was enclosed in a cramped cell at the Middleton Unit in Abilene, TX, serving year two of a 20 year sentence for gun and drug trafficking charges. And starting on July 1, for 40 days and 40 nights, he was cut off from the outside world—no phone calls, no visits, not even fresh air—as Middleton went into total lockdown, tightening its vice grip on thousands of incarcerated people in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
At the start of his sprawling new album Load It Up Vol. 01, Greedo talks through prison phone static about the meaning of its title. It’s a mindstate—“I know I had to load up on songs and albums in order to feed my family while I was gone,” he says. It’s also lingo, a command to the album’s sole producer Ron-RonTheProducer—“Me and Ron-Ron would work from, like, 9pm to 9am, nigga playing beats. Soon as I hear some hot shit, I be like ‘load it up.’” The call ends, Ron-Ron’s tag plays, and what follows is an hour of lived-in, reliable street rap from a couple years ago that continues to shape and contour the psyche of a rapper in his final days of freedom.
Greedo’s greatest, bleakest accomplishment since incarceration hasn’t been any one album, but rather that he unfurled so much of himself into his brief months in the studio before he turned himself in. He was effectively forced to create at a hyper-accelerated pace, to drain himself into stuffy, exhausting nights with a rotating cast of rappers, producers, A&Rs and journalists just so he could feed his family and keep his name alive while the system put him away. In that stretch, he allegedly recorded dozens of projects. So far, we’ve gotten five: two tightly coiled albums with A-list producers Kenny Beats and DJ Mustard; two EPs with Travis Barker and Nef The Pharaoh; and now, Load It Up Vol. 01, with longtime collaborator Ron-RonTheProducer. It’s by far the most classically Greedo of the bunch, open and percolating and reminiscent in sound and form to projects like The Wolf Of Grape Street and God Level.
On Load it Up, Ron-Ron and Greedo tap into a brooding, midtempo groove that navigates the purple hues between trap and L.A. street rap. There are no love songs, no experiments in pop. These are lusty, self-possessed screeds that flow with the buzzing synergy of a wired night in the studio. Greedo doesn’t directly allude to his then-impending prison sentence more than a few times on this album, but his frantic race against time is noticeable. There is a palpable urgency in the way Greedo, for instance, raps through error and mumbling, as though there’s no time for retakes. On to the next song.
Still, Greedo finds fascinating ways to weave together disparate thoughts into numbing, transportive images. On “Gucci Of My City,” he compares himself to Gucci Mane—a star who, like Greedo, spent his prime years behind bars — then shrouds his whole world in the tinted glass of car windows and Gucci lenses, almost to suggest that he’d rather stay anonymous even when he’s free. And on “Scary Movie,” he draws a line through Friday The 13th and AKs, headless horsemen and hollow tips, all to paint a ghoulish picture of the projects. This is writing that isn’t writerly, full of impressionistic detail; it’s the mark of an artist constantly observing, constantly connecting.
Most rewardingly, it is still such a thrill to just listen to Greedo. For how conservative the production feels, Greedo is still wholly unpredictable, one of the best with Auto-Tune this side of Future. He’ll twist the tails of phrases into oblique, ballooning shapes (“Gwap”), launch into breathless, croaky tirades (“Choppa Hold A Hunnit”), warble on high notes while they flutter through pitch-correction (“Same Zone Interlude”). His energy is whirring and kinetic and seems to rub off on the guests—Chief Keef, Sada Baby, Key Glock, and more—who all deliver top-flight verses.
That feeling of witnessing the rapper deeply in his zone recalls earlier, more hopeful times. Such is the tragic, inescapable truth of Greedo’s pre-prison recording spree: how it ceaselessly transports you to alternate timelines and more forgiving worlds. Greedo has lost a chunk of life over drug and gun charges that could be traced back to a litany of systemic factors, including losing his father as a child, moving into Watts’ insular, oppressive Jordan Downs projects as an outcast teenager, facing bouts of homelessness, having a baby at 18, and losing his closest friend Lil Money in a gunfight. Load It Up, Vol 01 is undeniable; it’s also inextricably tied to these cold, cruel facts.
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