In wrestling, one of the most euphoric moments is the debut of a new character with a cool-ass look and a devastating move—think of Brock Lesnar teleporting into the ring in 2002 with muscles grown on his muscles, leaving nothing but carnage. The hard part is getting beyond that initial awe and turning into a weekly personality, the type of character that you want to latch onto. That’s sort of what Bruiser Wolf is going through on his second album, My Stories Got Stories.
The Bruiser Brigade standout is one of those rappers that could make you pull over to the side of the road when you first hear them. Maybe for you it was one of his guest turns on early 2021 albums by fellow Bruiser Brigade MCs J.U.S or Fat Ray, where his flows sound like Bell from Willie Dynamite at 2x speed. Or maybe it was later that year, when he stole the limelight on the Detroit crew’s Alchemist-produced posse cut with a collage of doughboy memories and witty punchlines. Most likely it was his 2021 album Dope Game Stupid, where his conversational slick talk combined with Raphy beats that sounded like they should be blasting out of a Cadillac Eldorado. It holds up well over 13 joints. Now he has to do it again, and you can feel the pressure to adopt an incrementally more conventional style weighing on the album.
For one, the raps on My Stories Got Stories are less funky than they were on Dope Game Stupid. There’s nothing as out-there as him getting in his Curtis Mayfield bag for the bleak yet sticky hook of “Momma Was a Dopefiend” or the hyperactive and dark chants of “the dope fiend my best friend” on “Middle Men” that come directly after Fat Ray’s hearty reinterpretation of 50 Cent’s timeless chorus. The closest Bruiser Wolf gets on this album is the end of “Let the Young Boys Eat,” where he puts his spin on the breezy sung melodies you could find all over 1990s Bay Area rap albums. Even the beats—there’s still plenty of Raphy, but also others like Harry Fraud and Dag—bring to mind Griselda’s hard-nosed soul samples rather than, say, Cotton Comes to Harlem.
But he’s an eccentric enough rapper that even the streamlined version of his style is still a pretty fun ride. On “Looney Tunes,” he’s got his flow on a yo-yo as he changes speeds and stitches together details that add color to his dope-dealing flashbacks (“Just a Detroit hustler rocking the Fila brand”). His best bars are hilarious because of their specificity and randomness: “You sing like J.T. from The Five Heartbeats/My nigga, that’s a City Girl.” All of the dope analogies on “Holla at Ya Mans” are killer, including “had the white girl doing hot yoga” and “finessed the plug with Terms of Endearment.” Raphy’s beat on “G’z & Hustlaz” has that splash of opulence the others don’t and Wolf glides over it, though the flows could be quirkier. They are on “Crack Cocaine,” where he stretches his voice to a register higher than Chris Tucker’s in Money Talk.
I wish Bruiser Wolf bent his voice to those extremes even more often. My Stories Got Stories is pared down in a way that’s distracting, sacrificing a little bit of his individuality to make sure that as many people as possible recognize the depth beneath the jokes. So we have on-the-nose songs like “2 Bad,” in which he takes a crack at the sound of current Michigan street rap with Danny Brown and Zeelooperz, or his West Coast pimp-rap cut “I Was Taught To.” His music is already in conversation with those styles without having to make lesser versions of them. On “My $tory Got $tories,” he warmly reminisces on the grind that got him to this point, like your uncle off the yak on Thanksgiving, but with the repetition of the title phrase and a way-too-long Stephen A. Smith clip about the poor conditions of Detroit tacked on, the song does a lot of over-explaining. I understand why—underground rap is a tough business, and he’s trying hard to carve out a lane with longevity. But a rap album that has me thinking about the job of a rapper as much as the music is missing something.
