Lucas Foster is like Steve Kerr when it comes to raining threes.
For all the talk of the underground being played out by forum posters, corny A&R’s, and trust-funded “creatives” who have never created anything, it seemed alive and well this Valentine’s Day. I pulled up to a WifiGawd, TrippJones, The Khan, and Diamondsonmydick show in a 100 person warehouse venue somewhere near Skid Row. Love was certainly in the air, as a few of the best performers in rap music brought together a community of scenesters, artists, junkies, and journalists for a night (for a few, a night and a half).
I arrived alone, some two hours early and saw Iceland’s Wackest Rapper, Lord Pusswhip six and a half foot frame and ass-length hair immediately began our usual banter that ranges from SpaceGhostPurrp to EU geopolitical tension and had a hilarious interaction with the sort of wild ass fool who would set up a show like this. Pusswhip introduced me to Cashy, an underground legend from the very first wave of Memphis Revival in South Florida at the very beginning of this decade who had dropped classics like like “Wrong Way” (historically, perhaps the first instance of the ‘baby voice’) and “Playa Pimpin,” which got a historic Drake co-sign on OVO Radio in 2015.
That same night Cashy pulled up to the Bazzi_B studio up above Downtown with Pusswhip and TRiPPJONES and recorded this classic. Very appropriately, the lead single off Cashy’s Return of The Underground album (dropping June 29th), was recorded with producers from the Underground’s newest collective of relevance. Diversa Unit’s studio sessions often work how studio sessions for Triple Six Mafia looked like in 1995: the drugs are flowing, people come in and out of the spot for no reason, and classic records get pumped out in half an hour or less. Cashy and TrippJones did their back and forth like Infamous and Koopsta once did, pumped out a classic, and then a noise complaint shut the spot down.
You can trace the lineage here, from Memphis in 1995, to Broward County in 2011, to Downtown LA at the dawn of a new decade. From Infamous to Cashy to Carti, from a half dozen microgenerations of Los Angeles underground movements, it all came together on this track. If anyone ever tells you the Underground is dead, or that the seeds we planted aren’t still in bloom today, know they are too far removed from the bone gristle of rap music to ever be trusted.
Return of the Underground, ft Amber London, Slimguerilla, bigbabyscumbag, lordpackkap, Bonesthespitta, Trippjones, and Keynata, drops June 29th via Empire distribution.
