J.U.S / Squadda B: 3rd Shift Album Review
Detroit and the Bay Area are two rap meccas that are forever intertwined. Some theorize the bond goes back to the early days of the Great Migration when a few automobile plants moved from Detroit to Oakland; others claim the ties were built through generations of hustling. Payroll Giovanni, a modern-day icon of Detroit rap, considered the synchronicity to have fully bloomed in hip-hop when influential local crew the Street Lord’z were collaborating with Bay Area stars like E-40, Spice 1, and Too $hort in the late ’90s and early 2000s. For his part, Too $hort said, “Detroit, it’s like Oakland/It’s a Black thing and I’m a Black man.” (Hey, sometimes it’s really that simple.) If Too $hort’s Detroit shoutout was the proposal, then the Street Lord’z 1999 cross-pollinated debut mixtape was the wedding day.
That’s all to explain why Detroit’s J.U.S and Oakland’s Squadda B sound as if they share the same brain right out the gate on their first joint album, 3rd Shift. On the mic is J.U.S, a longtime engineer and producer with Bruiser Brigade, the Danny Brown-led crew of elder-millennial shit-talkers. In the last few years, he’s turned his attention to slick-tongued, autobiographical rhymes. Behind the boards is Squadda, formerly one-half of rap duo Main Attrakionz, who dropped one of the great mixtapes of the early 2010s with 808s & Dark Grapes II.
Together on 3rd Shift they’re a loose-lipped, hi-hat-happy riot. J.U.S’s storytelling is personal and funny as hell: a lifetime of balancing Detroit player status and more ordinary responsibilities has him worn down. “I’m on the road doin’ shows I don’t miss my bitch/She be hatin’, say I’m old, I should fuckin’ quit,” he raps on “Da Best Out,” sounding as weathered as Lethal Weapon’s Roger Murtaugh. Squadda underlines the mood with a stringy beat that could appear in a spaghetti western, a genre full of aging gunslingers clinging to their dreams. Squadda’s instrumentals are miraculously suffocating and untrendy: He sounds like he’s been disconnected from the internet for half a decade, which makes the beats feel fresh and unpredictable.
No surprise with Bruiser Brigade: The clique has created a world rooted in regional scenes—Detroit, specifically—while working at their own unconcerned pace. J.U.S pulls that off on 3rd Shift, leaning into the hallmarks of his rapping-ass city: Sticky one-liners and imagery that is so outlandish that it has to be rooted in some sort of truth. I could imagine his Cash Money bars on “Nascar” fitting in with the luxurious flexes of Peezy and Babyface Ray; I could hear his smoothly rapped verse on “We Outside”—with mentions of his chicken wing order and gator shoes—on a posse cut with the sharp-witted punchline kings of Flint. The shift is from Detroit hustler talking like a small-time kingpin to Detroit hustler sounding stressed out in the need of a vacation, raps where you can tell has lived a hundred lives and has multiple stories to tell about each one. On “Cheese Cheese Cheese,” his experience casts a gloomier mood as his struggles and insecurities pile up. On “6K” he approaches the neverending grind with a relentless sense of humor: “I got mortgage, I got habits, I got freaks I owe a few.” Everyday headaches are still the greatest source of hip-hop comedy.
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