03 Greedo has an artificially constructed eardrum, metal fused into his left leg, and clusters of grapes tattooed onto his skin. He spent his childhood in Sacramento, rural Kansas, Compton, and St. Louis, where he lived “in the basement in a house made of bricks.” At times he was, effectively, homeless. Around the turn of the century, he moved into Jordan Downs, a housing project off of Grape Street in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Barely a teenager, he fell in with the Grape Street Crips. His rap name is a paper-thin veil for those gang ties—he dropped a digit from 103, for 103rd St., and tweaked “Greedy”—and, in interviews, effectively shrugs at the obviousness. He has a popular mixtape trilogy called Purple Summer, he reasons, and there are those stenciled grapes. “How are they not gonna know?”
As a rapper, Greedo’s momentum in L.A. has been interrupted by jail stints and creative ebbs, but was accelerated in the last 20 months with a deluge of new music: nearly seven hours across the three Purple Summer tapes and Money Changes Everything, each of which is gripping and shockingly consistent. Because he moves so fluidly between styles, it’s difficult to point to a single Greedo song as a distillation of his sound or vision, but the best point of entry might be “Mafia Business,” the tribute to a friend who was murdered in the summer of 2016 that’s become his biggest hit. It sounds like a song you’ve heard before that’s being played in the distance, maybe underwater. Greedo bends his voice into something resembling a prayer for the dead to be allowed free passage; he raps, “I swear I haven’t cried in a hundred years/Last night a nigga cried about a hundred tears.” In the video, dozens of people, most draped in purple, hug, mourn, smile, dance, sometimes holding a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of the deceased with a real purple bandana tied around its neck. It is, to an extent, Greedo’s on-record identity in microcosm: familiar elements rearranged in ways that seem just a little bit foreign.
The lengths of those four breakthrough tapes we intimidating, but they served a welcome creative purpose for Greedo. When a project runs 30 or 40 songs, there’s less pressure on any individual track to carry the narrative or stylistic weight of the record writ large, and so songs are allowed to breathe as one-offs or asides or experiments. Greedo’s free to snap and cheese at the camera and dedicate full cuts to his love of Lil Boosie’s music.
On The Wolf of Grape Street, Greedo folds songs from his past work in with new records, too. But unlike Lil Boosie’s Bad Azz (Greedo cites it as his “Bible”), which roped in hits from his run as a cult mixtape star and was more or less a comprehensive survey of his styles, The Wolf of Grape Street is a careful act of editing, uniform in its urgency, with songs carefully chosen from Greedo’s massive vault and arranged to sound frantic and claustrophobic. It’s a pulsating, manic record from a singular writer and chameleonic stylist.
One of the things that makes Greedo’s music so compelling is the way he collapses the distance between one idea and the next. The ghosts that hang over his music—death, prison—are never too far away, and they color even the songs where they don’t swoop in. On Wolf, this means that a sex song on which Greedo worries his partner might set up him (“Beat That Thang Down”) dissolves into another (“Run For Yo Life) where he’s sleeping with a jailed man’s girlfriend into “Look At Me Now,” which he delivers mostly in a shout, and which starts with him flexing his record deal with the mogul Todd Moscowitz and ends with him repeating “same age that my daddy died.” It has the effect of placing his career as a performer on the same plane as the often unbelievable pain he expresses in his music: there’s no comfortable divide between what he sees in the boardroom and what he sees behind his eyelids.
The Wolf of Grape Street takes its name, obviously, from The Wolf of Wall Street, but where Scorsese imagined coiffed securities agents as the swirling vultures, Greedo was targeted by bounty hunters who shackled him in a van for nearly a week while they extradited him to the Texas panhandle. He’s facing 25-to-99 years on drug charges and 2-to-20 on gun charges. Jail has always figured prominently in Greedo’s writing, but the stakes here feel, understandably, far graver. That real-world legal peril is inextricable from the tortured “Paranoid Pt. 03” (“I think I need another lawyer”), and from the breathless pace of the album as a whole.
None of which to say Greedo’s music, or Wolf in particular, is humorless or oppressively heavy. “If I Wasn’t Rappin’” is bright and propulsive; he dives headlong into gleeful wordplay like, “Love my sisters on some black shit/White girl in my fucking baggage.” Even those men who descended on him from Texas are made to sound like a minor inconvenience: “Fuck the bounty, I’m just laughing.” The self-produced “Neva Bend,” another of his mixtape hits, broaches immense sorrow but is a little alien, drenched in synths and packed with melody and resolve: In the video, he raps, “My mama made me a star” while dragging a pistol across his face.
As a vocalist, Greedo sometimes channels contemporaries from Atlanta like Young Thug, breaking form in his verses to launch into song or hopping off the drums to rap more animatedly. But he’s also comfortable using more linear means to wring the emotion from his records. He’ll slip from pained yelps into crystal-clear diction, from venomous songs about kids getting jacked for their sneakers to sprawling lullabies about drug addiction, punctuated by the sound of seagulls. All of this makes him difficult to pin down in a rote lineage of Los Angeles rappers, but as Greedo will abruptly correct interviewers, he’s not from L.A.—he’s from Watts. The Wolf of Grape Street draws its power from that sort of specificity, but coheres into a broader rebuke of dread, panic, and walls closing in, wherever they might be.
