Features | Unison / Harmony 2014

Boogie

By Chet Betz | 19 December 2014

Long Beach rapper Boogie’s Thirst 48 is a tape with casual depth, sanguinity, a lurid landscape of pristine beats, rhymes that rotate on an axis of a product of his culture lampooning that culture as he owns it as he owns his heart as he “hates that shit,” and best believe he‘s not thirsty but he’s sipping. It’s also concise, dodging grandiosity and grandstanding; there’s a track where Boogie just, basically and gloriously, talks about being a “Westside nigga.” It is so plain, what Boogie does here, so effortless. “Who can do it like you? / Who can do it like me? / Who can do it like we?” We can do it like we, but who can do it like Boogie? And who can do it like us, asks Boogie. Then, how he expounds on “Do It Like We,” a fractal choir pin-wheeling gleam and shade around Boogie’s chill, numb, impassioned lilt: “It feel different when you real with it / We never change, but we feel different.” Uh, yeah, I feel different. Right now.

The sacrament of Thirst 48 is that it includes us in something too right and good for us to be included in. Anyone could have made this record until Boogie raps in such a way as to remind you, no, you couldn’t have. These beats aren’t that special except for their clarity, their cool warmth, coastal dusk at their core, city lights glinting off their edges, part of an environment that we are not part of, part of a vision that we don’t have until we hear this record. This is cloud rap with the clouds parting, divine favor beaming upon Boogie’s head, anointed. So Boogie raps, and it has the taste and color of pure truth. It’s the best non-Tribe Q-Tip record. It’s the best dream Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y could dream, slipping from their memory’s grasp as they crawl from out their fog; they scramble to jot shit down, pick up a pen but it’s a blunt, recede into blankets, sheets, ashes, the unbearable lightness of being a rapper. Thirst 48 is the splitting crack in the earth that swallows Lil B whole. It’s the real Kendrick Lamar. On the slow bounce of jam-and-a-half “Bitter Raps” Boogie eviscerates social media and urban culture plus the refrain that he’s not on the same thing until, in the last verse, “I’m probably on the same thing.” Danny Brown uses the confessional aspects of rap to find the beauty in real ugliness. Kanye dresses it up in the theater and self-loathing pomp of his ego. Meanwhile, Boogie seeks confrontation, conversation, and absolution.

“Won’t you save me?”, Boogie asks on the soaring glide and dip of the opener. That’s flipped on the penultimate track “Save You,” Boogie offering to save “you.” Us. “We fuck to Confessions (confessions).” On the opener Boogie observes that his/our generation lacks love; on “Save You” he claims “we’re made for love.” Boogie bemoans, in general, “Black Males” and then in the last few bars it’s lamentation as beatitude: “Free my niggas / We got problems we can’t pinpoint / I pen-point you straight to the pen that points get you in / Wind push me straight to the Point / What’s my point, my niggas? / Pen down / Writing to this pen pal / Really ain’t no point to that shit / Smoke a joint to that shit / Yeah, we yellin’ but we silent / Ain’t no words for that shit.” And I’m dumbstruck.

The song ends as Thirst 48 goes on, but then the record, too, is over too soon…but it is never over because I never stop playing it, I never stop hearing it, thirsty for it. Boogie decries the thirst for the ephemeral as he recognizes it, as it stews in his gut, as he molds it into a vessel for the eternal. On “Still Be Homies” he limns the material ambitions and transactional relationships of “being homies,” describing the bond with the visceral force of thug iconography, and then a mid-track segue divorces “thug” from the material, making it about self-respect, pride, identity. The beat changes into a fever swoon of angels, Boogie watching the death of a homie, feeling its approach on his own self, and then stating, “I’m a make a hundred mil one day, but I still be thuggin’ / They can throw a hundred years my way, but I still be thuggin’ / Ain’t no fake shit around my way, I’m still be thuggin’ / Man, I’m still be thuggin’ / I’m still be thuggin’ / I’m still be thuggin’ / Thug life.”

If there’s a mission statement on Thirst 48 it’s “Let Me Rap.” And it’s not Boogie’s statement alone. In “Bitter Raps” Boogie’s “most honest opinion” is the climax, declaring a wasteland of wackness around him as he points the finger at us and tells us he’s killing us. And he is, the instrumental postlude our elegy, we the prostrate. Following that with “Let Me Rap” might be the best 1-2 of any record this year, the latter’s virtuoso verses endearing themselves over one of those simple, perfect key loops and one of those simple, perfect horn accents and that simple, perfect snare ride while Boogie elucidates that he loves women but hates bitches, important to note the part where “Shit then got rocky, uh / That ain’t never stopped me, uh / Mommy played poppy, uh / Poppy played bitch, uh / Left us in a ditch / But somehow we never flinch, uh.” Boogie tells the bitches to fuck off. When he says, “Let me rap…man, real rap,” he’s saying to let him say what needs to be said. Let him be forthright. Let him be true. And those who have nothing real to say, stop adding to the noise. Speak your hearts and have ears to hear when others speak theirs. When Boogie implores, demands, “Let me rap,” he’s speaking for all of us. Boogie’s rap is spitting his spirit into the mic; from that fountain we drink, quenching the real thirst: honest-to-God human connection. And then we do it like we; we all have our own raps. Don’t make us yell silence. Let us live.