YG’s debut My Krazy Life was a hardcore gangsta rap album, but the Compton rapper didn't present himself like a kingpin: On songs like “Sorry Momma,” he self-identified as a small-time house raider and set-claimer, a cog in a much bigger machine just looking to survive (and party in the meantime). But YG’s life has gotten crazier since then: Last year, he was shot by an unknown assailant at his Los Angeles recording studio. Since then he’s mostly used the attack to self-mythologize, boasting that he’s “hard to kill” and claiming that he left the hospital that night and continued working on his album the next day. Last month, shots interrupted the video shoot for his single “Thug” with rapper AD. Police believed the shooting to be gang related. “Gang-related” shootings in Compton are sadly routine; when near the set of a YG video, they can be a coincidence or a coordinated assassination attempt. How do you tell the difference?
These are the subjects that plague him on *Still Brazy. *The album is mostly a status update, examining how the collision between YG the gangster and YG the semi-famous millionaire disrupts his life in Compton. He uses his economical rap style, which boils every concept down to its root, to swat away an ongoing barrage of assaults, some brought on both his new life, others by his old one (on the title track, he shouts, “Why everybody want a piece of my pie?!”) Aside from being a finely crafted personal statement, Still Brazy studies the psychology behind being a celebrity gangster, the ever-present fear of retaliatory violence, or the risk inherent in simply getting caught at the stop light on the wrong side of town sporting the wrong colors.
“Who Shot Me?”, the song that reflects on the incident that left him hospitalized last June, is easily the emotional centerpiece of Still Brazy; its meticulous recounting of potential perpetrators shows off the sharpness of YG’s writing: “Having nightmares of me coming for dude/Having a hard time putting together two and two/They was in a brand-new truck, somebody sent them dudes.” The rest of the album spirals out from this incident, finding him consumed by paranoia, ducking foes both real and perceived, questioning friendships, and watching his pockets.
He also flashes a nascent social consciousness. In its replacement of feel-good party jams with protest music about race and sexual politics, S**till Brazy occasionally scans as My Krazy Life Goes Woke. “Blacks & Browns” weighs the “but what about black on black crime?” question against the impacts of classism and racism. Then there's his flagrant political statement “FDT,” an anti-Trump anthem that seems designed specifically to be chanted defiantly at rallies. Outside of the awful “She Wish She Was,” which plays like a cringey thread of meninist tweets, these moments deliver big, particularly the closer “Police Get Away Wit Murder,” which addresses the long history of police antagonism in Los Angeles (and by extension, all urban centers) over foreboding synths and a steadying drum kick. He’s a very efficient rapper who writes clearly and forcefully, but he isn’t out to offer solutions, just to ask questions and pose hypotheticals.
Still Brazy is his first departure from the isolated synth riffs of longtime collaborator DJ Mustard, but there isn’t much drop-off in chemistry. He is replaced on the boards by DJ Swish, Heartbreak Gang co-founder P-Lo, 1500 or Nothin’, and jazz rap maestro Terrace Martin. Alongside Iamsu!, P-Lo has been at the forefront of HBK’s hyphy revivalism movement. Martin has been a fixture on the west coast scene for over a decade now, working on albums for Snoop Dogg, Warren G, DJ Quik, Kurupt, Murs and, more recently, every member of Black Hippy.
Along with Swish, who handles the majority of the production, they create a palette spanning several generations of west coast rap music; these are some of the richest shades of g-funk, p-funk, and hyphy, reimaged in 1080p, a collage of retro sound packages reformatted into something new. It isn’t sequenced quite as carefully as My Krazy Life, which segued flawlessly from track to track, but it remains remarkably even. YG is as committed to the album format as someone like J. Cole, who has made a career out of trying (and failing) to replicate the “classic rap album.” YG, on the other hand, is merely focused on making a cohesive project that is more than the sum of its parts.
Still Brazy solidifies YG as a torch-bearer for west coast gangster rap. “I’m the only one who made it out the west without Dre/I’m the only one that's about what he say,” he raps on “Twist My Fingaz,” beating his chest in conquest. But Still Brazy is as much a cautionary tale as it is a triumph. Making it is having a million dollars to put on the head of the man who tried to kill you at your studio, but if someone is still trying to kill you after you make it, did you really get out?
