This old picture of Boosie is everything: the jewels, the paternal love, the gap-toothed impish grin.  I digress. There are two reasons for this post. The first is that in case you missed it, Boosie remains incarcerated, despite the spate of racist hoax stories that disseminated across the web earlier this week. I spoke with […]

Max Bell conducts all business meetings at the IHOP. The wise man knows that he knows nothing at all. I’m either paraphrasing Socrates or RZA. Listening to too much rap in college can cause you to conflate philosophers and rappers on a regular basis. Baton Rouge’s Southside Brasi, Kevin Gates doesn’t know many things either. He […]

2013 has regrettably arrived and vanished without a single 10-year anniversary article on Ghetto Stories, the album that broke Webbie and Boosie outside of Louisiana. I understand it’s not easy to wrangle Mel and Turk, Webbie or Boosie, but someone could’ve at least called up Mouse on tha Track to rattle off a few memories. […]

A reminder that the ratchet cities were Shreveport and Baton Rouge before the Miley and molly crowds stole it like Prometheus untwerked. Max Minelli is a BR legend and the backstory has already been articulated here. If you know his catalogue, he has plenty of searing tears for the fallen songs, trunk rattlers to ride around […]

It’s been said by Deen and others that Kendrick omitted plenty of great rappers off the laundry list of rappers that he bleached. Killer Mike, Danny Brown, Freddie Gibbs, Gunplay, Kevin Gates, Action Bronson, Schoolboy Q. Along with Kendrick, those are my picks for the top eight of the last year and none were mentioned […]

Straight out of the Kevin Gates video playbook: lounging on a bed in a white tee with a very sexy woman. Religious imagery. D-Boys. The forlorn stressed-out shot in which his world is going to crumble but you know he will triumph. He is Gates and he will not lose. I have been part of […]

I’m not even going to give Gates any more high praise; you already know where I stand. Gates starts this song by dismissing the Future comparisons, then he shrugs them off, then he becomes Jamaican mid-way, then he closes out the song by telling the engineer not to change a thing. KB, who I have […]

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 […]

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 […]