As 03 Greedo’s 20-year prison bid continues, so too does his bid to remain relevant. He stashed a lot of music away in anticipation of a long hibernation, and his latest is Netflix & Deal, a 13-track collaborative tape with rising producer Kenny Beats. Greedo said that the project is based on movies he watched while he was dealing, and you only have to be half-paying attention to know he meant that literally. These are songs very loosely inspired by his streaming queue, usually about or related to selling drugs in some way. It isn’t the strongest work from either artist, but the white EDM DJ turned rap producer and the face-tatted trap rapper from Watts make a good odd couple.
Greedo leaned heavily on his melodies for Still Summer in the Projects, but from the rapid-fire mumbles of “Traffic” to the staggered chants of “Aye Twin,” his raps are center stage here. Greedo has said that making music isn’t a conscious process for him, but this time he at least had some external stimuli: he would watch scenes from his favorite movies on his phone in the studio and then hop in the booth to apply them to his raps.
The tape does enough to earn its title, but some of the duo’s most impressive connections come when they aren’t trying to make good on its premise. Greedo remains one of the best rappers working, even behind bars, and his style is all-purpose: “Payback” flips Big Tymers’ “Still Fly” into a stunter’s anthem, while he pairs off with Maxo Kream for some respect-the-shooter flaunting on “Beg Your Pardon.”
Kenny Beats has a way of punching up a rapper’s sound without losing his own: adding more bite to Rico Nasty’s mosh-raps, bringing suavity to Freddie Gibbs's pusher chronicles, warping Atlanta trap for outsider Key!, pushing Vince Staples toward the bounce of SoCal radio. But Greedo told him to set all the “Greedo shit” he’d prepared to the side and give him something else. It’s clear he wanted to branch out in as many directions as possible in his limited time —as he puts it in the making-of doc, “You gotta show ‘em as hard as you would’ve been, in a short period of time.” Thus, Kenny lets Greedo rummage through his recent releases like a kid at a Redbox kiosk. Freddie, Key!, and Vince all appear, and it’s a bit like binging the last two years of Kenny Beats with Greedo offering director’s commentary.
The vibe is more couch potato than cinephile, and the tape works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are Home Alone bars, some character-actor bars you’d expect (Blow’s George Jung) and some you wouldn’t (Stitch from the animated Disney franchise), bars running through the Brad Pitt IMDb, and rapper-movie inception bars (in which Greedo thinks he’s Paid in Full’s Rico, a character played by Cam’ron). Songs like “Blue People” and “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” construct entire snappy hooks out of nothing more than titles. With Netflix & Chill, 03 Greedo and Kenny Beats never try to make a movie; they’re content to be distracted and charmed by them, and that preoccupation becomes contagious.
