The sweet, effortless musicality of Koran Streets' songs make them easy to enjoy. But his work rewards close listening because of how the 26-year-old Berkeley, Calif. rapper conveys intensity through the unique, subtle artfulness of his narrative style. There’s an internal logic, a 360-degree consistency to his work, the byproduct of an auteur who has marshaled all the tools at his disposal to convey his story in the most compelling possible fashion. It was an approach he pioneered on his U.Know.I.Got.It mixtape series and perfected on 2016’s underrecognized debut You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album), which was recorded over the course of two years. Newly released as a “Deluxe Edition” with new cover art and three appended bonus tracks, Koran Streets’ debut has a more refined, well-defined artistic vision than even the most celebrated contemporary hip-hop.
He was homeless as a child before his family settled in Berkeley. Early in his teenage years, he was badly burned in a “freak accident,” spent six months in a coma, and received multiple skin grafts. His mother, Ayodele Nzinga, was also the founder of a small Bay Area theater company, and he and his six siblings grew up acting. (Koran Streets has since appeared in critically acclaimed independent films Licks and Kicks.) His past and present were spilled across a run of underground mixtapes dating back several years, where he developed an ear for hip-hop’s seductive textural possibilities. On You.Know.I.Got.It, it’s Koran Streets’ distinct sound that makes each track feel of-a-piece. The beats build mainly on a thumping Bay Area template, but he distinguishes the album by opting for pillow-soft synthesizers polished to a sleek finish. An archetypal example is “Struggle,” which recognizes the potential for an infinite loop in the cool sigh of the intro to Cherrelle’s ’80s R&B song “Everything I Miss At Home.”
Atop these satiny canvases, he layers his choruses with a heavy dose of imprecise overdubs and his own “You know I got it” and “Streets!” audio drops. This verbal cacophony gives a rattle to the image, like watching the rearview mirror vibrate when the bass kicks. In this way, his rapping also serves as a center of gravity, so much so that the beats feel like they were laid against his verses rather than the other way around, the drums yoked to his vocals. The contrast between the soft-focus production and this echoing vocal cloud is magnetizing. Yet the cleverness of this approach, essential as it is to the album’s success, takes a subordinate role, drawing listeners in only to orient them around the visceral stories at the center of each song.
Few rappers say so much with so little; where others rely on ornamental tricks, piling syllables up like so many blankets in a humid summer season, Koran Streets’ lyrics have an austere directness which captivates because of his devotion first and foremost to the gesture—each line fits the idea like a hotel sheet. Attempting to capture the exact substance of this work is a slippery task; it’s not the lyrics, not flows, not vocals, moral, or “message.” Rather it’s the primacy and strength of the connective tissue between each of these more concrete qualities, the sense of coherence which bonds them to each other and allows each piece to reinforce the power of the others.
So far, Koran Streets hasn't had the kind of virality that mints “street rap” stars of today, and his lack of an experimental pedigree or explicit political focus keep him from appealing to the audience who like “good hip-hop—not like that commercial stuff.” Instead, he embraces the grammar of hip-hop’s pathologized center, with song titles like “Struggle,” “Hard,” and “Ima Thug” and concepts that revolve around a street soldier stuck in the local drug game. He seems uninterested in pushing away from the genre’s tropes in part, Occam’s Razor suggests, because it still relates to his life. That he reinvigorates what some deem “clichés” is a credit to the narrative particulars of style and story, a deeply personal approach that relies on contrasting its quotidian setting with monumental emotions.
His ability to craft novel experiences from these commonplace tropes can be revelatory; witness newly-added bonus track “Real Money,” where Koran Streets dreams of a life in which he is making a lot more money. This is, of course, one of the most conventional hip-hop saws existent. Yet his proximity to poverty is conveyed in such palpable terms throughout the album (“So many households I done slept on the floor!”) that the emotional stakes have been dramatically heightened; when he pleads, “Just a little longer, let me please not open my eyes,” the effect is devastating. It’s not poverty-porn, it’s an anchor for a wide breadth of experiences that grants equal power to biting, comic lines like this one, moments earlier: “Attend the event, even if it’s weak, it’s the shit, cause a nigga rich.”
The way he pulls grand emotions from the linchpin of realism is epitomized on the album’s scene-setting centerpiece, the lushly-produced “Mama House.” The familiar, hyper-local setting is transformed into a world-sized stage. His lyrics have an elemental simplicity, directed towards straightforward stories which gain power in the contrast between his plainspoken poetics and their implied emotional content, the surging production, and the purposeful determination of his rap style:
There’s no wordplay, no efforts at distancing through abstraction. Yet this austere style shouldn’t be confused with old romanticized clichés of “raw emotion,” where the artist’s expressiveness breaks against the strictures of technology or songcraft, letting the blues seep out through the flaws in his primitive approach. Koran Streets’ narrative style is one of purposeful economy, the effect of having stripped his style down to its most urgent pieces. This consistency is a product of experience, an inner artistic confidence that refused to be boxed in by the opportunities presented to him, and a vision which seeks to create a world that makes sense from the raw material of a difficult life.
