Emekwanem Biosah, better known as the gritty Houston rapper Maxo Kream, is full of dark revelations. He often sounds unrepentant and unforgiving, but he comes off like a realist; exposed to the cruelties of life early, savagery and lawlessness became his standard. Set-tripping and hustling made him money and granted him a measure of power, and so he doesn’t regret the terror he’s caused, just the people he’s lost. There’s no going back: fast money is what he knows, and he’s cultivated a taste for violence. Punken, his first mixtape since being arrested in a 2016 drug and money laundering sting, takes a peek inside his operation and provides backstory. (Members of his Kream Clicc Gang were arrested for shipping drugs from California to Texas, and a narcotics task force seized 85 pounds of marijuana, 2,000 Xanax pills, and 13 guns.) The tape is family-oriented in the sense that shootouts and trafficking treat organized crime as a family business. This is “trap philosophy,” as he calls it on “Capeesh.” Punken is chock full of his most unsparing storytelling and unflinching raps that preach commitment to the mob, the mantra of a gang lifer.
Being loyal is the moral of almost all the stories on Punken. This principle shapes the way scenes play out on the tape. Songs like “ATW” and “Janky” relive scenarios where snitches destroyed families or crews. When the songs aren’t focused on those around him, they’re about distribution or his enterprise, packaging and moving work. “Maths teacher ask me Maxo why I’m always skippin’/I was trappin’ fractions after school like detention,” he raps on “Work,” the mixtape’s pusher anthem. When he isn’t moving drugs, he’s using them recreationally (“Love Drugs”). On “Pop Another,” he binges on Xans and lean, as each line slips into the next. But don’t lump him in with his peers, who he labels addicts. “All these rappers junkies talkin’ like they dope dealers,” he raps, scoffing, on “Roaches.” “One song they scammers the next song they killers.” Identity and authenticity are everything to him, which is why he’s so hell-bent on affirming his rep.
Maxo has always been an impressive rapper and an imposing force, maximizing his thunderous voice, but Punken has his most effective writing, his most complete performances, his most engrossing setups, and his most enduring images. His cadence constantly shifts on “Hobbies,” packing internal rhymes into choppy schemes before stringing individual phrases out. On “Janky,” the sentences all run together, but the messages are clear, sharply turning and segueing into each other. The single long verse builds to his indictment of the criminal justice system: “Court gettin’ judged by 12 whites/Who never had to struggle in they goddamn life.” He’ll often add a splash of color to liven a scene (“Little nigga, 13, got the older niggas plotting on him/Wrinkled ass tee even though he got the iron on him”). Then there are the potent mini profiles, delivered with a straight-faced, nearly wooden demeanor, like this of a coked-out uncle: “Petty thief and junkie, but he always had my most respect/When I was six I seen him stab a nigga, and he bled to death.”
So much of Maxo’s sharpest scene-setting happens when he’s reflecting, and Punken thrives on these moments. As a teenager, after he was kicked out of his parents’ home for arousing police suspicion, he moved in with his grandmother, and this transition inspires much of his writing. “Grannies,” a clear standout, features a rotating cast of characters traveling in and around her house, his grandmother being the only acknowledged authority. The song sketches vignettes of his relatives, revealing how they shaped his worldview: In one scene, he boosts his aunt’s car to commit a robbery, and when the cops come knocking, she follows protocol: “Never snitched, betrayed her family, but she always told my Granny.” Each snapshot is intense and effective.
As on past tapes, the content of Punken is plenty violent, but the beats aren’t as disquieting and feel far less dire than those on Maxo 187 and The Persona Tape. He’s replaced the gloom with more viscous and diverse beats, and the change of pace suits him. There’s even a Tame Impala sample. Newcomers like the Wilderness, Beatboy, and Mexiko Dro contribute colorful productions. Trap veterans Sonny Digital and Honorable C Note effortlessly share space with oddballs Tommy Kruise and Ethereal. His booming raps cut through any noise.
In the album’s closing seconds, “punken” is revealed to be Maxo’s family-given pet name. Only minutes after lamenting the damage Hurricane Harvey did to his mother’s home, and the toil his cases have taken on his family, his parents reiterate how proud they are of him. It’s a powerful few moments. The subtext is that everything he’s done, from juuging to making music, is in service to them, to the memory of the brother he lost, to the ones still living. After 43 minutes of criminology, Punken establishes itself as an autobiographical look into a hustler’s motives.
