In July of 2018, 03 Greedo reported to a Texas prison to begin serving a 20-year sentence related to drug and firearm charges incurred during a 2016 traffic stop. The Watts, California rapper had always been prolific: From the start of 2016 through the beginning of his sentence, he released seven LPs, three of which clocked in around 90 minutes, while two more ran two hours apiece. But in the weeks leading up to his incarceration, he recorded at an even more astonishing pace, summoning collaborators from around Los Angeles to various studios at all hours of the day and night.
Many of the songs written during this period have since been released, usually on projects helmed by a single producer. These records occasionally recall Greedo at his elastic best, folding and stretching into ridiculous shapes to accommodate the disparate sounds he loves to synthesize: bounce from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, warbled singing from Atlanta, scuttling claps from his city’s own strip clubs. Still, they all rest on a shelf below his pre-prison material, perhaps because it often feels like there are too many people in the room. Though he has turned in scorched-earth guest verses on other rappers’ songs, Greedo’s music is strongest when it hermetically seals you inside his psyche—when each interpolation or irrupting confession feels unmediated, unedited, and raw. Of all the music he’s released since he began serving his sentence, Project T-Pain comes closest to recapturing the sorcery of his 2016-18 run.
Created during that period—and circulated subterraneously as a .zip file for more than five years now—the finally released album also pairs him with a single producer, this time LA’s Dnyc3. But whether it’s due to the more considered sequencing, more wrenching writing, or a less idiosyncratic collaborator (for better or worse, it is impossible to hear a Mustard beat and think of anyone else), the comparatively brief set feels like it flows directly from one man’s hyperactive brain.
On the second song from 2017’s Purple Summer 03: Purple Hearted Soldier, Greedo noted his trips in and out of lockup with a sly joke. “I might freestyle this whole album,” he teases, “‘cause I hate the pen.” But Project T-Pain opens with a much starker vision of the incarceration he faced at the time he wrote it. “You ever rode inside a bucket van?” he asks on the sweeping “Stronger,” where he invites the listener to imagine being “shackled from your hands and your feet.” A few bars later—before Dnyc3’s drums have even kicked in—Greedo laments experiencing homelessness before finding success, only to realize that he won’t beat the case in front of him. It’s the sort of bloodletting that would usually be reserved for an album’s end; by slotting it at the very front, the stakes of every encounter with an enemy or squad car that follows feel impossibly high.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
