G Perico - All Blue

Pitchfork 79

If you’re unfamiliar, G Perico can seem like a contradiction in terms. He channels pimp rap legends, then calls into KDAY to dedicate slow jams to his girl. He opened a business near the same blocks where he used to earn all his money tax-free, then survived an assassination attempt after he’d gone legit. When he was a child, his grandmother gave tarot card readings out of the house; the rapper, born Jeremy Nash at the tail end of the ’80s, thought he could see his own future, one that ended in an early death. And when he makes his case against Donald Trump, he does it on a song built for the strip club—City Hall is too far north, anyway.

But nothing about G Perico is a contradiction. His lived experience is that of someone who grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the ashes of crack and Reagan and the Riots. He wears his hair in a Jheri curl and could trade slicked-back shit-talk with anyone up to and including DJ Quik and Too $hort, and he always makes sure his lawyers are paid on time. On his debut album, All Blue, Perico funnels all of that and more into lean, shimmering songs that recall early ’90s G-funk but provide, well, a blueprint for the future.

Last fall, Perico put out Shit Don’t Stop, an engrossing mixtape that made him a minor sensation on both sides of the 10 freeway. All Blue is Shit Don’t Stop blown up to its widescreen endpoint: more joy, more peril, more money. There are sunny afternoons interrupted by drive-by shootings, liquor-soaked parties with third strikes looming overhead. On the opener, “Power,” he raps, “My homies live forever, we ain’t never gonna die,” but the understanding that this might not be true underscores almost every song on the record. And when All Blue ends, with “Alive Tonight,” it breaks up fatalistic verses with a hook that doubles as a somber thank-you for another 24 hours free from handcuffs or bullet wounds.

It’s hard to overstate how focused All Blue is. It clocks in barely longer than 35 minutes; of 13 tracks, only three surpass the three-minute mark. So rather than a first-person narrative, the LP plays as if G Perico is your friend you catch up with a few times a day, dispensing wisdom (don’t walk with the flow of traffic, in case killers try to pull up behind you) and summing up the grimmer part of his life in neat couplets (“I could’ve been lost my life, Crip/So fuck all that nice shit”). The songs are sleek and economical, from their tightly wound structures to remarkably straightforward storytelling (from “Can’t Play”: “My uncle smoked crack/I used to sell it to him/I used to drop it in his pipe and watch him go stupid/After every four zips, rubber banded cash/Grab some more and throw all the money in the stash”). The fat’s been cut away—all that’s left is bone, sinew, and curl activator.

All Blue is the record you make when you can’t sit still. When he raps, Perico is constantly in motion, whether he’s skipping out of police custody before he sees the county jail (“Wit Me Or Not”), flying back and forth to Vegas just to play craps (“How You Feel”), or fucking, digging through her purse, and leaving (“Get My Staccs”). Physical spaces figure prominently in his work, and Perico renders them in such vivid detail that when he brags “made hundreds of thousands on West 104th Street,” your mind’s eye can populate the block with every actor. Perico’s at a point in his life where he can bounce back and forth between South Central and palaces in the Hills; he just happens to have his sharpest thoughts while in transit.

Perico invites obvious comparisons to ’90s legends like Quik, but he’s not a revivalist. If anything, he seems to exist parallel to conversations about era and lineage in rap. In his writing, Perico’s world is populated by neighbors and enemies and smokers desperate to wash his cars—never other rappers. It’s refreshing, and it eases the weight of tradition and expectation, all while pulling liberally from the aesthetics of the early Clinton years. In that way, All Blue is a distinctly L.A. record, shaped by the city’s culture but not backward-gazing or needlessly reverent. And on “Bacc Forth”—the anti-Trump song Angelenos will hear all summer between midnight and last call—he boils his city’s ethos down into six words: “Looked at death and started dancing.”