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.

Money Man — Red Eye

True to his name, Money Man surprised those familiar with the whispers about Cash Money Records co-founder Birdman’s below-board business tactics by successfully buying himself out of a contract with that label, handing over $250,000 in cash to return to the independent circuit. Since that handshake dissolution, in early 2018, Money Man has released 16 full-length mixtapes. These are all, somewhat confoundingly, at least enjoyable, many of them intoxicating. There is a pointed baritone, couplets that leap out of the Notes app, and drums that reach in and shake your skeleton. A friend once noted to me, I think correctly, that it seems Money Man drops the sixth-best rap record of the year every six weeks.

Though based in Atlanta and fluent in the musical language that the city has adopted over the past decade or so, Money Man has also been riffing on the reemergent Memphis scene that has become more central to the national conversation over that same timeline. His latest record, Red Eye, opens with “Drums,” a duet with Detroit’s Babyface Ray that layers Memphis club rap’s bass scaffolding with the sort of airy, digital dreamstate that has become popular with the descendants of Young Thug’s descendants over in Georgia. This gives way to b-movie villain's themes (“Law”), elevator music turned evil (“Traits”), and that same playfulness from “Drums” slowed to a creep (“Jet Speed”). The result is an LP that is exploratory if you want it to be but punishing no matter what.

This is all enhanced by Money Man keeping the stakes refreshingly and rewardingly low. The groupies in his songs go to Georgia Southern and find his lazy eye charming, his criminal enterprise rounded out by a “white boy from Boston” who “really be hacking.” Like other rappers who are similarly prolific yet still tethered to the album format (Mozzy, YoungBoy, et al.), Money Man circles back, again and again, to reliable narrative arcs, whether they play out across a tracklist or in four-bar spurts. Where Mozzy sells this repetition by being a superlatively original writer—and YoungBoy through melodic inventiveness—Money Man simply chips away at the same block of marble, refining as he goes.

TEC — “Rewind”

Speaking of regional styles: After the initial wave of Lex Luger-led maximalism stopped emanating from Atlanta, Baton Rouge became the nexus for bombastic rap that filled mixes and rattled club speakers. That was not the city’s only significant export; it also transposed the emotional core of Boosie’s pre-prison blues raps into the ranging, melodic pain music that was also bubbling elsewhere—in Florida and Atlanta and Chicago—in slightly different iterations. At its best (see: Kevin Gates), BR produces artists who merge these two approaches into one that totalizes through pathos and pure power at once.

TEC does not present the perfect convergence that Gates does—he skews slightly toward those softer textures—but his filtering of the uncomfortably raw through a pop lens has long made him one of his city’s most undervalued artists. His latest single, “Rewind,” has hints of this (there are references to always-nascent murder charges, crooned through Auto-Tune) but is full of more straightforward celebrations: of trips to Dubai and of a spider pendant that looks eerily like it could come to life at any second, sure, but more meaningfully of the ability, after a tumultuous adolescence and early adulthood, to walk through the mall with your friends, ungodly stacks of cash in your hands and pockets, and see nothing but smiling faces.

Money Man & TEC: First & Fifteenth