got game like jesus

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For all the ::extremely Don Trump voice:: haters and losers who inexplicably care about my music taste, or at least peeped my Pazz and Jop ballot to check out how much of a hater and loser I am, you perhaps, maybe, potentially have some sort of inkling that I extremely heavily fuck with YFN Lucci, a hip-hop guy out of Atlanta who kinda sounds like like Young Dro doing Skooly’s crooked crooner thing. As a huge fan of Dro and Skooly I would have been hooked from the first time I heard his voice, but his 2015 tape Wish Me Well blew me the fuck away. It was stuffed with this whole world-weary vibe, like Lucci had just walked through a desert with all his chains on just to tell you something extremely important. And despite some serious knowledge from the real heads (i.e., my mans Kyle Kramer at Noisey put me onto him originally, plus the one time I ever had a conversation with Brodinski he was telling me how much he’d wigged out over Wish Me Well) it really feels like the indie music press has unjustly overlooked dude—Fader and Pitchfork haven’t posted about him, and Complex has only done one thing about him, which was a premiere for a redux of his Skooly collab “Wonder Why,” with Skooly mysteriously scrubbed from the track and replaced with Yo Gotti. And it’s not like Wish Me Well was an inconsequential tape! It featured Rich Homie Quan and Johnny Cinco plus had a Sonny Digital beat on it, it did numbers on Livemixtapes and DatPiff, AND I’m like vaguely certain he got radio spins in the ATL. So why was no one writing about him? Because there is no god*, that’s why.

Maybe that will stop now that Lucci has dropped Wish Me Well 2, (duh) the sequel to Wish Me Well. Much like most good street-rap mixtape sequel, it replicates the basic sonic template of its predecessor, but it’s mixed way better, there are more high-profile guests, and the songs aren’t quite as good. Still. Broh. Brah. Bruh. Breh. Brih. And sometimes Bryh. You’ve GOT to check out “Key to the Streets,” specifically around the 2:30 mark, when Lucci, Migos, and Trouble start trading lines like some sort of triplicate flow We Are the World style supergroup. As he is with every song he’s on, Trouble is the unsung hero of the whole affair, acting like the quarterback of the last 90 seconds, calling dudes to the mic and dropping adlibs to egg them on. I listened to this as I was driving to a Migos show in Orange County on Friday night and I got so hype I nearly jammed my feet through the floor and started running at 75 miles an hour on some Fred Flintstone shit.

To be honest, “Key to the Streets” is barely a Lucci song, but that’s fine. If “Key to the Streets” gets you listening to the whole tape, then I’m happy. And I’d assume Lucci will be happy too, but then again I’ve never met the guy so he might not give a shit what you think.

*PLUS, I’m like 95 percent sure that Bryson Tiller robot jacked the beat from Lucci’s “Perfect” to make that wannabe Drake mansplain-trap-n-b song. Or maybe Lucci stole the beat from Bryson Tiller. In which case YFN did a way better job with it, plus Bryson Tiller’s tweets read like fortune cookies you’d pick up at Supreme.

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