Paul Thompson was last scene at Harold’s with a two piece and fries
If you still haven’t seen True Detective, don’t worry. We here at Passion of the Weiss present the following footage just as Freddie Gibbs chose to: without context. But as you follow Matthew McConaughey’s Detective Rust Cohle through doors and past stunned onlookers, gun drawn and eyes wide, you understand that neither he nor Gibbs is fucking around.
After releasing the Madlib collaboration Pinata to immutable acclaim last month, Gibbs made it clear that there would be no downtime or laurel resting. With his Eastside Slim already on the horizon, he let loose this week of “On Some G Shit”, a haunting trap record that give you some sense of what Halloween is probably like in Gary, Indiana. Utility player G-Wiz is cast in the Woody Harrelson part, and he pulls it off superbly, his flow sharper and more confident than in any of his five appearances on last year’s ESGN.
It has been popular since at least the ancient Romans to say that gangsta rap is “dead”, and it has never been true. Still, the search for a messiah is perpetual, and Gibbs has fallen into that role for the past few years. In his case, the fixation on his aesthetic is earned—the man is an unqualified, capital-G gangster. But the narrative drawn around Gibbs always threatens to obscure the simple fact that he not only raps very, very well, but also is versatile and not averse to experimentation. On the heels of ESGN, “G Shit” would not have seemed like a deliberate sonic choice. A year later, Gibbs is Matthew McConaughey in this scene: calm and of a single purpose, creating chaos as a means to his own end.
