We at Hip-Hop Wired pride ourselves on being fully immersed in the music of the culture we rep proudly. Part of our duty as a publication and crew is to school the masses on who is doing what musically and there’s no better way to do that beyond our CRT FRSH (Certified Fresh) bi-weekly playlist.
This week’s CRT FRSH playlist opens with “What It Feels Like” featuring the late, great Nipsey Hussle and JAY-Z for the Judas & The Black Messiah soundtrack. Over some beautiful production from the production collective 1500 Or Nothin’, Neighborhood Nip and Hov sound amazing together, and their themes of Black empowerment sound even harder with the backdrop of the film along with the legacy of slain Black Panther Party leader, Fred Hampton, Sr.
The soundtrack wave is up right now with Coming 2 America dropping soon. Def Jam’s Bobby Sessions links up with Megan Thee Stallion for the track “I’m A King” and speaking of being up, Cardi B’s new hit “Up” is here on our list as well. Pooh Shiesty and Gucci Mane trade verses on Pooh’s “Ugly” track from his Shiesty Season project. And the immensely talented Chicago star Chris Crack joins up with his creative equal U.G.L.Y. Boy Modeling for the hilariously titled “Flip Phone Hangup.”
A big salute to the recently-freed Rowdy Rebel and his new joint “Jesse Owens” alongside NAV, while we make sure to shine the light on the legends lurking in plain sight such as Hus Kingpin, who delivered the stellar Portishus album this year, on the track “The Intruders” with Von Poe and Detroit gunner, Ty Farris.
JID lets off a joint as he preps his latest full-length, pairing up with Conway The Machine on the soul-stirring “Ballads,” and we’ve added some artists who deserve some mention for sounding fresh in a sea of sameness such as Merlaku Ra, Carol Cake, Rigz, Jamal Gasol and more.
Peep the flyness down below. And be sure to hit us up if you think your joints belong on the stage. Make sure it IS some heat prior to hitting send.
Nate Wade and Kev Hannibal of the Hip-Hop duo GUMBO Music were raised in North Carolina and New York City, respectively, but didn’t even end up meeting until they were both on the other side of the world. Now based in Australia, the two men have forged a friendship rooted in fatherhood, expatriate experiences and Hip-Hop.
This ‘rap duo’ idea just happened to work out just as COVID-19 peaked worldwide and global shutdowns were already underway.
“With most ex-pats, you just sort of gravitate towards those you assimilate with,” Nate shares. “So it becomes a group of African Americans, a very small group, there aren’t a lot of us, but we’ve known each other for so long, just being homies. The music thing didn’t start for us until six months ago.”
Before they started working together, both Nate and Kev were doing their own writing, solo. But their debut EP, This Is GUMBO, fits like a glove, it’s a cohesive project that showcases Nate and Kev trading slick one-liners and sharp concepts on everything from the title track to songs like the blithe “You and Me,” a meticulous love story complete with a surprise ending. “It’s crazy how the music really just came together so easy. It was so organic,” Kev explains. “It was too smooth, too good to be true, to be honest. It was just, ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday so we can record.’ And we were writing up as we were together. There were barely any times that we wrote outside of being in the studio together.”
When the whole world was in the thick of the COVID pandemic, two American expats living in Australia, decided to join forces and call themselves GUMBO without even realizing that musically, they would end up being each other’s perfect ingredient.
Source: Kai Godeck / GUMBO
Hip Hop Wired: What’s life like out there? How is it raising kids in Australia?
Nate: Life out here is… They like hanging out, taking days off and going to the beach. Their work ethic is very different, they lead a life of leisure as some would say.
Kev: Raising kids here, we just try and give them balance. I started taking my daughter home twice a year before COVID so she’s getting to understand and see, “Okay. This is my family here. This is American culture.” She’s still young so you know, you have to spoon feed them our culture, who we are, what we’re about and where we come from. She’s always like, “Daddy, I wanna go back to Grandma Sherry’s house.” She knows there’s a big difference between the two. She’s like, “There are so many buildings! So many lights in New York!”
And here there are just beaches and trees…
HHW: What’s it like creating an EP in the middle of a pandemic so far from home?
Nate: It’s kinda like a gift and a curse almost, because when acts were able to come here prior to COVID, you could access people a lot easier than we probably could back home because it’s a numbers game, all of Australia is Florida, population-wise, [but geographically] It’s as big as the States. It’s just that there’s nobody here and you can’t live in the middle, there’s no water. So everyone lives on the coastline. There’s only five million people in all of Australia, so imagine trying to subclass them into music, then trying to subclass those people into Hip-Hop, them numbers change. Drastically.
HHW: There’s some semblance of a Black Lives Matter movement going on down there, correct?
Nate: I think what they had going on in Australia at the same time, which didn’t get a lot of media attention, was that the Aboriginal people had been having a lot of deaths in custody, so they’ve been fighting their own fight where they kinda moved in unison together.
Kev: They kinda piggybacked off the movement because they consider themselves the original Black man as well.
Nate: The white people there, they stole the land of the Aboriginals and put their flag on it. The same thing that happened here, happened in the West Indies, happened in the States… The British moved around the world doing the same thing.
I believe in the 1970s they still had the White Australian Policy.
Kev: It was only 50 years ago, when the Aboriginal people were considered human beings.
HHW:What’s it like to be a Black man in Australia right now?
Nate: I feel like in the States we dealt with racism more directly because we’re grassroots Americans. Like, our grandparents went through what they went through so we’re only one or two generations removed from that. When most expats move to wherever they move to around the world, you see how powerful Black culture is around the world. Our friends back home? They don’t understand that until they leave. Black culture is the most duplicated thing you’ll ever see. Even here. There are white kids that would die to be a part of that culture. You realize how much of an impact it actually has, from music to fashion to everything. You realize the impact that it has on the rest of the world. And it’s huge.
HHW:It’s always interesting because no one has to be convinced that Black culture matters, but Black lives? It’s a whole issue.
Nate: It’s people’s interpretation of what Black Lives Matter means. We know where it stems from as in the core of police brutality and things like that, but it starts with us too and how we treat each other and how we… Some of these are vicious cycles that we’re not going to fix in a conversation or some years, it’s just what we have to constantly work on.
HHW:You talked about the group of African-American expats out there, how did you guys manage to strengthen your friendship beyond being from the same place?
Kev: It was more about us keeping our children together to see other beautiful little Black girls, because it’s so whitewashed here. So our main purpose was to keep our daughters together and continue building a family inside of this country and it was like, “Well, we both do music.” Then COVID hit and we were like, “Let’s just do music.”
HHW: And the music is legit. You two sound as if you’ve been working together for years.
Nate: I think what helped us is that we both grew up loving the same things. Loving the Lox and Mobb Deep, loving Little Brother and all the other Hip-Hop we fell in love with. So we figured we’d try and make that from a genuine place. We’re not doing it for the ‘likes.’ We don’t need the money, we have normal jobs. We just like doing that shit, that made it easy, It’s like a heavenly flow.
HHW:What are your favorite songs from the project?
Nate: I actually like “This is GUMBO” because it’s not a traditional song, it’s really just rapping for three minutes. Usually it’s like: Hook, Chorus, Hook, Chorus. Then “See ya later.” I just like the concept where it just flows.
Kev: For me, I think “Serious” is my favorite because my music has been changing over the last few years. People are always telling me, “Just rap. Rap like where you from…” But I’m into the storytelling thing because I wanna take it into other avenues, you know what I mean? So we just decided to rap so people know we have songs for the girls, songs with a little aggression from not being able to go home, missing family and things like that. Sometimes I wish I was back in my grandmother’s basement in Queens so I could get into that grimy energy: gunshots, people screaming outside, the cabs, etc. Doing those types of songs have me feeling like I went back home in my mind for a second.
HHW:The world seems to be watching the U.S. government and the man in the White House right now and although you two aren’t here, your families are. What are your thoughts on the space America’s in right now?
Nate: Everybody works for Fox News all of a sudden and everybody has a damn degree in Political Science. Man, I don’t know. What’s scary is that he still got 74 million votes. So I look at it like, Democrats have four years to get it together. If they fuck up in these next four years, you better believe he’s coming back with a vengeance. So I hope they do right. Because they’re glitter acting like gold too.
Kev: I just feel like, no matter who’s in office… At this point, so much has happened to us as a people, like, what else can happen? Even during the Obama administration, we had our Black man in there but more people were killed by the police. More has happened to us under their administration than anything else. So I just feel like it’s more about us, and what we’re gonna do for each other and with each other. Putting our money together, trying to stand together… All the president is, is a puppet anyway for the most part. They don’t really control anything. So again, I feel like they’re done so much already, what more can they do to us? Except for what they’re doing now, making us get vaccines, which, who knows what they’re putting in there… They took our banks, Black Wall Street, from chained slavery to the school to prison pipeline now. I just feel like it’s on us now.
Houston’s Velliano‘s been on his grizzly for a minute now in an effort to bring his city back to it’s “Still Tippin’” glory days and with his latest clip for “4 Certain” he seems closer to achieving that goal.
In his black-and-white visuals to the cut, Velliano flosses a grip, burns some greens and politics at a mall while kicking some head boppin’ ‘ish to keep your neck loose for the rest of the day.
“This song came about organically, it was all about my emotions at the time,” Velliano tells Hip-Hop Wired. “Then the video was just me mobbin’ around the town with my videographer – just having fun with the song. Overall I’m very versatile lyrically. You will hear some different sounds from me throughout this new year.”
Peep Velliano’s latest Ignacio Gonzalez-direct clip to “4 Certain” below (you can also stream the song on all channels right here) and let us know if you’re feeling what the young gunna got in the chamber.
Pontiac, Mich. rapper, YouTube personality, and label owner DDG, born Darryl Granberry Jr., loves his hometown but was still focused on getting out into the wide world.
“I did all the stuff I needed to do to not be involved in [anything] bad in Pontiac, he tells Hip-Hop Wired. “I stayed in school, got my grades right. I was actually valedictorian in high school, that’s why I call the project Valedictorian.”
The project DDG mentions would be his just-released debut album, Valedictiorian. It’s available on Epic Records and his own DDG Entertainment imprint—a partnership, which means the 22-year-old also owns his masters.
Although DDG only made it to his sophomore year at Central Michigan University, don’t shed any tears thinking he needed this music thing to pop off because his college career didn’t work out. Thanks to a pair of YouTube channels, created while he was a still a student, DDG was banking in a month what some people get for a year’s work. A move to Los Angles and some power moves later, the title of certified rapper and singer are now firmly etched in his CV.
“I was doing little diss tracks on YouTube, but they was hitting millions and millions of views,” explains DDG (a jab at Lil Yachty did big numbers—like, 12M views to this day). “People really liked my sound, they liked the music I can make. So I decided I wanted to make real music. I came to realize it’s one of the hardest transitions to come from YouTube and do music because people automatically be like, ‘You’re just a creator, you’re not supposed to be making music.’ People try to typecast you. But you can’t deny good music.”
DDG has been delivering quality tunes which have also steadily been amassing ridiculous YouTube views for their accompanying visuals. To effectively pinpoint the switch from YouTube personality to becoming a proper artist, it was DDG linking with Famous Dex for “Lettuce” a couple of years ago.
“That was my first song after the diss track wave,” says DDG. “I was like I need to make some real music because I know that if I just drop a song, people are not going to take it serious. ‘Ahh, another dude off the Internet trying to make music.’ I got the feature, it hit, and it got like 400,000 views in an hour.”
DDG posted “Lettuce” on his own page, but Worldstar came calling and boosted its signal. More songs and videos, including “Givenchy,” followed but an R&B-flavored joint called “Arguments” is what secured the bag as far as labels looking to partner up.
He says, “I was glad because I completed my whole plan, which was to show that I’m versatile—I can sing and rap. And my first R&B song went super viral. That’s when the deal came and when everything got set off.”
Now Valedictorian is available everywhere, and DDG is still maintaining revenue streams most rappers can only imagine.
“I don’t promote my YouTube channel, I promote my music. Cause people can listen to me and then they find out I do YouTube, all of a sudden they get attached,” says DDG “That’s how you fall in love with me as a person.”
He continues, “These days it’s all about the people liking you. Your music gotta be fire. A lot of people in this world can make fire music, but if you ain’t got no personality, people don’t really attach to you, relate to you, then it’s really not going to stick.”
Expect DDG to hang around for a long while. Peep his latest video for “Push” below.
Young Bugatti is all-encompassing. He’s one of only a few known artists that can write, produce and engineer his own work without much assistance, if any.
It was one of the main characteristics that attracted former NBA All-Star—and current television star—Baron Davis [Fuse’s WTF Baron Davis] and led him to sign the then-18-year-old to his LA Unified imprint four years ago. Now the Los Angeles rapper is set to release his debut mixtape, Young Bugatti, this spring.
Around the time of his signing, the Long Beach, CA rapper was just trying to survive. His serendipitous meeting with Davis happened when Bugatti stopped in at his regular studio spot to re-up and play around with the boards. Davis, a self-proclaimed studio rat, popped in with his friends and was shocked at the level of artistry this young kid had within.
“He had made a record called ‘California’,” Davis tells Hip-Hop Wired. “And I just felt like this kid represented the new direction that LA rap was going in. It had an LA sound. It had elements of Nate Dogg but still had a newer sound, like Ty Dolla Sign but rapping.”
“For a kid to be that young and humble…” Davis continued. “All he wanted to do was make records. So he has a ton of music but I think it was just about finding the right time and opportunity. But he’s finally able to take himself to the next level and be established in LA.”
Even Bugatti, born Travon Futch, can admit that he’s matured since his signing. Now’s his time to shine after realizing that this was all he’s wanted since he was a kid. “Growing up and watching my dad have his studio in the garage and me being out there with him 24/7,” Bugatti tells Hip-Hop Wired. “Music just grew on me. So at 8 or 9, I would start going in the studio and messing with equipment. My dad is the reason I do music to this day.”
Source: LA Unified / LA Unified
In 2017, Bugatti dropped the high octane track “Thru Dem Bands,” and his online numbers shot up. He ended up with a million views on Facebook. But he always knew people would eventually start to pay attention. His newest track, the melodic “Alright” highlights Bugatti’s day-to-day efforts to “make it,” and he says it’s one of the most definitive records on his self-titled debut. The mixtape also boasts an appearance from Detroit darling Kash Doll on a flashy club track and although this first project isn’t out yet, Bugatti is already plotting on the release of the second, aptly titled, Sweetest Revenge.
“When certain people started seeing [the Facebook numbers], it opened their eyes,” he says. “But it seems fake because it’s like, y’all should’ve been on it before. Now that everything is happening, it’s like the sweetest revenge. Just watch.”
Davis believes that his signee is ready for all the success to come. “When he was younger,” says the former UCLA star. “I couldn’t afford to spend the time necessary, but he had a lot of growing to do and moving up and out on his own so I think he’s at that point. Now’s the right time.”
