If you can watch this video and don’t get shook, then I feel sorry for you. Shit like this is why I loved rap music in the first place. It reminds me of the first time I heard the Menace II Society soundtrack with “Str8 Up Menace,” “Trigga Gots No Heart,” and “Pocket Full of Stones.” This is the sort of gangsta-rap song that made gangsta-rap what it was. Not something to be marketed and packaged to suburban kids wearing hats with Olde English script, but real wounds and damning testament. The first-hand war stories traded out over cassette tapes. The sort of music that you felt like people had died for.
Starlito, Don Trip and Gates switch the circumstance to the present-day rise of gun massacres. The video matches the song to gruesome perfection. You understand the mentality of a shooter better than any essay anyone could write, or any hyperbolic comic Eminem verse. This is the rawest material possible. During a month when this can come out alongside the Danny Brown project, there is no excuse for your complaints. There is no Yo! MTV Raps to play this ad infinitum, but you’re watching it right now and the effect is the same. If this makes you feel sick, that’s the point. This is both a good thing and a tragedy, like most of the best art.
The first single from Step Brothers is below the jump. You can read older interviews from Starlito and Kevin Gates here and here.
