Paul Thompson once paid Bill Cosby to be the boss
Los Angeles is a series of different worlds stitched together by dry heat and poorly maintained freeways. Pick up a tourist, drive them ten miles, and drop them off—they might as well be in a new universe. (Or maybe they stumbled onto the set of the new Hunger Games.) Sunny Manhattan Beach’s Mira Costa High School is only fifteen miles from the heart of South Central, but the real journey is much longer and more complicated.
Cozz traverses that distance swiftly and with great ease. The “South Central LA nigga, just a different type”—who will “hit the beach at day, then [be] back at 65th at night”—is one of the best young rappers in LA. But he isn’t the familiar transient, the outsider-in-both-worlds underdog. “I Need That” follows the breakout “Dreams” in establishing Cozz as an aggressive, assured gangsta rapper.
Devinchii’s beat cleverly marries spacey synths with rolling trap drums, and Cozz tears through the negative space with vigor: “The knife got me feelin’ like I’m Superman/But praying I don’t run into a Crip tonight”. Barely over two minutes, “I Need That” is packed with both barbs (“I swear you think you poppin’ ‘cause you Instagram famous/It ain’t the fucking same, kid”) and considered introspection (“A lot of pain, a lot of funerals here/I’m still standing like I just lost in musical chairs”). His debut, Cozz & Effect, drops soon.
