Mozzy: Yellow Tape Activities

From blockbuster biopic Straight Outta Compton to the Game's latest throwback, Documentary 2, California hip-hop history is big business nowadays. YG adapted LA gangster rap tradition to a modern production palette on My Krazy Life, while Kendrick Lamar and Vince Staples deconstruct the genre’s tropes and ideologies. Yet far from Southern California's party-driven nostalgia and cerebral critique, a Sacramento-based underdog on a shoestring budget has exploded underground, offering a bleak, confrontational take on street rap that’s at once urgent and unsettling. Yellow Tape Activities is Mozzy's third solo full-length this year, and his snowballing fanbase suggests grim realism still speaks to present conditions.

Although young, Mozzy didn't arrive overnight; he's been recording for half a decade. As far back as 2010 tape Mozzarella Fella, he displayed the skills of a gifted writer, latching onto vivid imagery: "Pour the Patron in the Ocean Spray cran-grape/ I'm well-buttered like a Grand Slam pancake." But over the past two years his style really snapped into focus, becoming leaner and more direct. Along with producer June on the Beat, he cultivated a sound defined mainly by narrative style rather than melody or sonic technique.

And this focus is one perpetually shaped by violence—think of Chicago's drill scene, although Sacramento has a long history of its own brutal reality rap. Yet Mozzy takes his own path. His rapid evolution over the past few years reached an apotheosis with 2014's "Next Body on You", on which Mozzy’s disconcerting lyrics insistently pressure the listener into the role of a crew hitman: "Next body on you, 'cause you don't never do it." June's production, a canned loop that sounds like a forgotten arcade game theme, sounds worlds away from the booming maximalism of Lex Luger; the song's teeth are entirely lyrical, not musical, and this juxtaposition backlights Mozzy's unflinching audacity. His unprecedented directness makes murder less abstract, an absurdity transformed, seen through the more familiar lenses of peer pressure and shared burdens. 

Yellow Tape Activities lacks the immediate highs of previous Mozzy tapes Bladadah and Gangland Landscape, but the album retains the rare consistency for which the rapper is known. There are no Mozzy filler verses. Nothing here seems aimed at the pop charts, although Mozzy's gift for a potent chorus suggests this isn't far from his reach. Opener "Property of the Ave" epitomizes his gift for morbid hooks, tossing off sticky lyrics with unbothered ease: "He ain't never bodied nobody on our behalf."

The darkness of his world is one brought to life by its unapologetic, almost ascetic discipline, focusing on a few major themes: loyalty, purposeless murder, and drug abuse. All are linked by an ever-present pain which can be spoken of in art but never expressed in reality. This comes through on the fatalism of "Ain't Shit Happen" ("You don't slide for your niggas like I do for mine/ Living on the borderline of suicide") and the way he considers his mother's concern as just another threat ("I don't care about my life like my momma care"). These are strict parental-advisory raps. The very visual and ever-present violence is disturbing, an art form pressed to its limit. He pushes gangster rap tropes in your face, placing them in unexpected, discomforting formulations.

That this remains gut-wrenching despite years of gangster cliches is one aspect of his artfulness; that we keep listening despite the shock is another. In part, this is owed to the musicality of his flow, the particular way in which he packs in syllables and slant rhymes in memorable patterns. The stitching is wholly unique and feels brand new. It's present in the density of his slang, which adapts nearby Bay Area terms and Chicago street slang but submerges them in a local dialect that takes time to decipher. Mozzy slides, slithers, wiggles; his illas will wolf on 'em, back door 'em, breathe on 'em; guns become drum sticks, chop stixx, yop sticks. This isn't simple decoration. Every verse is written with bar-to-bar purposefulness that leaves listeners hanging onto each line. Its as if his ideas were carved from cliche with a straight razor.

Mozzy’s art is at once shockingly new and alarmingly bleak. Or really, the situations he describes are bleak, as Mozzy is an artist whose feet may still be intertwined with the world that shaped him. Rather than a glorification of violence, the unremitting effect of his music is ceaselessly dire—the upsetting vision of one man from Sacramento's tough Oak Park neighborhood.