The latest stop for the trap music’s infiltration of the Hip Hop landscape is America’s Northwestern apex of Seattle, Washington. Black Umbrella artist and 300 Entertainment’s first-ever signee Raz Simone shows that he is not as much a rapper as he is a spoken word artist or street-hustling propagandist spilling his guts and glory on record. Raz is verbose with detail, sometimes fitting as many lyrics he can within a bar without caring if it’s tangentially off beat, with an acute sense of musical breadth for jazz, R&B, and classical motifs on most of the tracks throughout his latest project, Trap Spirituals EP. The soundscape on the majority of this 8-track extended player makes you feel like you’ve entered a string symphony in a trap house to his passionate testimonies for peace and paper chasing.
The opening track “Massa Sir” opens with a haunting, softs melancholic violins to counter the trap standardized hi-hats and drum programming. Razzle Dazzle performs a revenge fantasy denouncing oppressors such as the Ku Klux Klan and societal debtors that hold him back from getting his stacks, paralleling himself to a plantation overseer that makes grams into his slaves: “Can I whip it like ‘Massa’/ When my wrist put it down, make that dope jump up like “Massa”/Can I whip it like ‘Massa’/Oh lord/In the field with the white, moving work all night.” And there are brassy jazz horns to give it a jazz feel to give it balance and palpability for interlopers of the trap music scene.
Lyrically, the high points on Trap Spirituals are the second and fourth tracks “Plottin” and “Oh Lord,” respectively. Raz shows his vulnerability as Solomon Simone, as he crawls displays his political stance about police brutality and black economic empowerment, while exposing his internalized struggles with nihilism from being beat down the U.S. government. Songs like “That Nigga” and “Gangstah Shit” have instrumentals creep with a Gucci Mane-style drawl with a sultry R&B guitar licks reminiscent of Cameo’s Top 40 hits of the eighties. “That Nigga” is repetitive in its verses to make sure the listener understands how and why he anoints himself as such, but the beat sounds like you can play it at a summertime Baptist church barbecue. In the last three tracks of the EP, “Respect For The Dope Fiends,” “Why You On My Line,” “Green Light” are odes to his street life with slow as molasses subwoofer-knocking beats. In many instances on the bridges of songs, Raz muses that he doesn’t have to make money off rap, while admonishing people who can’t contribute to his pocket for being filled.
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King Raz is all business, showing that his respect in the street equals the amount in his bank account. With production that sounds like a cross between Organized Noize, the classical strings from Xzibit’s “Paparazzi,” with slabs of R&B and gospel choir singing, and sporadic soul-searching and self-aggrandizement in the spirit of Hip Hop, Trap Spirituals is a decent addition to the oeuvre of Raz Simone. However it seems like it serves a purpose to set himself up for a greater masterplan for 2016.
