Cozz - Nothin Personal

Pitchfork 69

Completists have it easy with Cozz. Where most rappers have their growing pains scattered around Soundcloud or on shoddy tape dubs, the South Central rapper emerged fully-formed, all grit, learned distrust, and half-full/half-empty 40s. Two years ago, his pair of debut singles, "Dreams" and "I Need That," shook the Los Angeles street-rap community to its core; by the fall of 2014, the ink was dry on his deal with Interscope and Dreamville Records, the imprint run by J. Cole. News of the signing was followed in quick order by Cozz & Effect, an excellent mixtape that paired his forceful, sandpapered voice with spare beats.

Cozz’s breakout comes in the midst of a renaissance for L.A.: Kendrick Lamar and YG with their variations on the familiar Compton myths; Open Mike Eagle and Busdriver with their looking-glass art rap; Earl Sweatshirt with his white-knuckled self-improvement; and excellent, often daring music from the likes of Cam & China, Skeme, Speak, Nocando, and more. (Vince Staples and Boogie are lurking down the 710 in Long Beach.) But what makes him stand out in the crowded field is his restlessness. Cozz’s writing keeps a sense of forward motion, where each high school liquor store excursion or bus ride from Manhattan Beach back to 65th and Western is as sleek and economical as a film script. 

His new offering, Nothin Personal, is a low-concept stroll through the Crip-controlled blocks of Cozz’s youth. On the somber, reflective "Grow," he remembers accounting for the $10 his father used to leave him for lunch money: "I used to spend five dollars on the weed/ A 40 ounce with the other half—every day/ Starving myself for the hunger of a buzz." In other hands, "Choice Today" might come off as dull moralizing; here, it’s the eerie, slinking voice in your head that tries, often successfully, to drag you off track. That song is also vocally experimental in a way he hasn't tried yet: he mostly abandons his staccato cadences for a slow warble, something he also trots out for "Grey Goose" and on the latter half of "Tell Me." Unfortunately, the latter is also the clumsiest moment on the record, a song about sex that’s really a song about control in the least interesting way possible. 

The tape’s high-water mark is "City of God," which pairs him with Boogie for a slow creep that darts from battered Ford Explorers to boardrooms and back again. One one level, it’s two of Southern California’s finest trading cracks about piety and iPhone read receipts; on another, it finds them in awe of the fact that things are finally, mercifully panning out. But each rapper is inherently skeptical of what’s laid out before them—so it’s back to speeding through Florence, eyes on the road.