First & Fifteenth is a column by the Los Angeles-based critic Paul Thompson, who reviews new and notable rap music twice a month for Audiomack World.

03 Greedo & Mike Free — Free 03

When incompetent attorneys urged 03 Greedo to take a 20-year plea deal in the Texas drug and weapons case that stemmed from an illegal 2016 traffic stop, there was enough material finished and on hard drives to flood the internet during his incarceration. The Watts rapper had made sure of this: in the final few weeks before reporting to prison, he wrote and recorded at an absurd pace, cataloging many of these songs into albums that he titled and sequenced. Some of them, like Project T-Pain, have become talismans around L.A.

Despite that, very little Greedo music has been issued during his sentence, nearly all of it confined to a trio of single-producer LPs: Still Summer in the Projects and Netflix & Deal, with Mustard and Kenny Beats, respectively, in 2019, followed by 2020’s Load It Up Vol. 01, which paired him with local linchpin RONRONTHEPRODUCER.

Free 03, a mixtape announced days before news of Greedo’s parole broke, continues this pattern, aligning him with former Mustard partner Mike Free. Comprised largely of old records—three tracks feature Greedo rapping over the phone, from behind bars—Free 03, like that prior trio, falls short of being a major work that sprawls like God Level, the first and third Purple Summer installments, or Money Changes Everything; it doesn’t drill into alien new styles like the second Purple Summer or hinge on a long narrative arc like The Wolf of Grape Street. But when it works, as it does frequently, especially on its buoyant front half, Free 03 isolates much of what makes Greedo a generationally talented rapper, at once a master synthesist and a true eccentric.

The tape drags when Free, who twice sued Mustard for money and credit on songs like Tyga’s “Rack City,” YG’s “My N***a,” and 2 Chainz’s “I’m Different,” defaults to sub-strip club boilerplate (“Buss Down”). Fortunately, this is more than balanced by inventive cuts like “WOW,” which sounds as if it’s pulsing through a limo’s navigational screen. That record aside, the essential music here comes in the early five-song run that begins with “Took a Little Minute” and continues through “Pourin,” the BlueBucksClan collaboration built around Greedo’s unforgettably exultant hook. He practically spills out of the breathless “No Free Features”—which features a verse from the late Drakeo the Ruler—and turns “Today,” the best of the jailhouse recordings, into something between a threat and a benediction.

Starlito — "Rocket Man Freestyle"

I’m not interested in litigating which rappers are actually telling the truth in their rhymes. Starlito’s style, though, depends on his building trust with the listener: the boasts have to feel conspiratorial, the confessions a little painful. For his “Rocket Man Freestyle,” the Nashville native borrows from Boosie, one of the greatest writers ever to follow that blueprint. Lito retraces familiar grooves (the meditative power of work for its own sake, a weariness that can’t be self-medicated away) before bumping up against the limits—and perils—of documentary. “GPS data say they had you on the scene of the crime,” he raps amid laments about fentanyl-laced pills and fractured friendships. “The beat’s hard so we believe when they lying.”

03 Greedo & Starlito: First & Fifteenth

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