A joyride to hell & back, in 20 mins tops
Perhaps, mindlessly denouncing their whole bag as just another burgeoning rap collective, I have gotten this Griselda thing all wrong. It could in fact be a record label that means serious business, with Los Angeles rapper Boldy James now nestled under its wing.
The Versace Tape completes Boldy’s trilogy of 2020 albums (could there be even more?), each fashioned by producers not averse to slipping a drop of soul in the cauldron. The Alchemist cooked The Price of Tea in China; Sterling Toles furthered the aesthetic on Manger On McNichols; and this newest drop, surely a commitment to signature, bears the touch of one Jay Versace. Boldy has knocked around for a while, you’ll discover, but in the ghostliness of Price of Tea (I think) debuted a certain musicality: one that now finds a warm and toasty resting place in the Detroit-leaning sensibility of the Griselda production ethos.
This album lasts all of 23 minutes. It seeps into your headphones via 70s-inspired samples and does its business quietly. Boldy easefully reports the process of cutting a brick of cocaine in record time, wishing fleeting business partners well, and parting the earnings between the next big score and the persistent dream of a cleaner life. When it’s not some soft vocal slice from yesteryear, it’s funereal piano keys Boldy rhymes over: just a tad nostalgically, and only a little remorsefully.
The man seems to understand that even his biggest fans, even his newest converts, aren’t much in the mood for time-wasting this year. I turned this album on to simply fill a vacuum in the morning air, and repeated pretty much every song at least three times. ‘Maria’ for its doleful horn, ‘Cartier’ for that breezy piano key, and ‘Brick Van Exel’ for this ruby: “Plug bless you, then you throw the phone away after we text you/Can’t stress to you enough, You can’t fuck up if I connect you/In Detroit, the streets is multiple choice ‘cause they gon’ test you…”
I feel like a broken record raving about storytelling rappers. But the especial difference with Boldy James, and all I have is a hunch ultimately, is the sense you get that he treats every song like the last he’ll ever record and perhaps the last you’ll ever hear. That urgency brings his lyrics to life, “Lord if I go to hell, can I still wear my ice?” and enables them to assume the finality of what scriptures you’d read a man at his execution. “And if I did,” that last line goes, “just let me take my sprig’ and a pair of dice.” There’s that gorgeous cliché again, about the free man who can’t help but sling the rock he knows.
The Versace Tape is a careful display of manhood, and raphood, that’s waiting just as patiently as anyone for the world to resume its sordid rotations. I didn’t even notice it was over in 23 fucking minutes.
