Kevin Gates: everybody’s sworn favorite — except for the one guy in the comments section who insists otherwise.  We celebrate complicated personalities in rap — at least in the post-Kanye world. I have met few more tough to categorize than the Baton Rouge vampire-loving auto-tune-using anti-materialist who loves luxury goods. Sometimes. I guess by dint […]

Luca Brasi might have gained Gates fans among the Intelligentsia coffee set, but “Satellite” was the anthem that orbited throughout Louisiana last year. A few misconceptions have been floating about the Baton Rouge rapper lately. For one, he was never signed to Young Money. He’s had a management deal with them. So there was no […]

Vaguely generic but bludgeoning Baton Rouge rap that I am posting because it’s a Friday and everyone is wired or snowed in and there is a Max Minelli guest appearance. People have been comparing Kevin Gates to Lil Boosie lately and that feels like a false comparison only brought on by people knowing two rappers […]

Baton Rouge’s Luca Brasi creeps in silently on a Friday night to drop one of the year’s heavily anticipated mixtapes. Between this and Indigoism, it’s like Holiday Gift Man has been stealthily dropping presents down the chimney (wrapped in a Live Mixtapes banner). I’ve been jamming it for the last hour and off a cursory […]

If a rapper from anywhere other than Baton Rouge or Shreveport called herself Trillary Banks, I’d be skeptical. But in Louisiana, the word “Trill” is practically birthright. Then again, 19-year old Pretty can call herself whatever she wants when she raps this smoothly and with this much swagger. Though the hype-mannish dude who introduces and […]

The official video drops for the only “Love Sosa” freestyle worth watching. It’s also particularly applicable because Baton Rouge is the only place in America that might have a murder rate as high as Chiraq.You can see the decay of the Southside in the video or you can just read this story about how a […]

Max Minelli ranks among the most slept-on rappers to ever exhale. So slept on that he couldn’t even make Complex’s list of most slept-on rappers of all-time. He and Masta Ace might have been the most glaring omissions. Maybe it is a rappers with M names thing. Maybe not. Max Payne has been putting it […]

If you’re only going to listen to one “Love Sosa” freestyle, make it this one by KVN Gates. When I went down to Louisiana in the spring, Gates already owned the region in a way that hadn’t happened since Boosie and Wayne were at their peak. Over the last six months, he’s only been getting […]

I met Max Minelli in a strip mall parking lot on a broiling Baton Rouge May afternoon. The  Boosie trial had just ended and the city was slowly settling back into its usual hair trigger lull. We spoke for about an hour, pausing every ten minutes when a different patron passed by, stopped, and strolled […]