Project T-Pain

In July of 2018, 03 Greedo reported to a Texas prison to begin serving a 20-year sentence related to drug and firearm charges incurred during a 2016 traffic stop. The Watts, California rapper had always been prolific: From the start of 2016 through the beginning of his sentence, he released seven LPs, three of which clocked in around 90 minutes, while two more ran two hours apiece. But in the weeks leading up to his incarceration, he recorded at an even more astonishing pace, summoning collaborators from around Los Angeles to various studios at all hours of the day and night.

Many of the songs written during this period have since been released, usually on projects helmed by a single producer. These records occasionally recall Greedo at his elastic best, folding and stretching into ridiculous shapes to accommodate the disparate sounds he loves to synthesize: bounce from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, warbled singing from Atlanta, scuttling claps from his city’s own strip clubs. Still, they all rest on a shelf below his pre-prison material, perhaps because it often feels like there are too many people in the room. Though he has turned in scorched-earth guest verses on other rappers’ songs, Greedo’s music is strongest when it hermetically seals you inside his psyche—when each interpolation or irrupting confession feels unmediated, unedited, and raw. Of all the music he’s released since he began serving his sentence, Project T-Pain comes closest to recapturing the sorcery of his 2016-18 run.

Created during that period—and circulated subterraneously as a .zip file for more than five years now—the finally released album also pairs him with a single producer, this time LA’s Dnyc3. But whether it’s due to the more considered sequencing, more wrenching writing, or a less idiosyncratic collaborator (for better or worse, it is impossible to hear a Mustard beat and think of anyone else), the comparatively brief set feels like it flows directly from one man’s hyperactive brain.

On the second song from 2017’s Purple Summer 03: Purple Hearted Soldier, Greedo noted his trips in and out of lockup with a sly joke. “I might freestyle this whole album,” he teases, “‘cause I hate the pen.” But Project T-Pain opens with a much starker vision of the incarceration he faced at the time he wrote it. “You ever rode inside a bucket van?” he asks on the sweeping “Stronger,” where he invites the listener to imagine being “shackled from your hands and your feet.” A few bars later—before Dnyc3’s drums have even kicked in—Greedo laments experiencing homelessness before finding success, only to realize that he won’t beat the case in front of him. It’s the sort of bloodletting that would usually be reserved for an album’s end; by slotting it at the very front, the stakes of every encounter with an enemy or squad car that follows feel impossibly high.

It can be a thrill to witness Greedo’s unbridled energy as a rapper. On “Going Back,” he melts into a cascading flow—his third cadence in a single verse—that at first seems to break free from Dnyc3’s beat, only to be revealed as the anticipation of a thumping drum change. The album’s title is an advertising gambit; Greedo has always rapped and sung in nearly equal measure, and few beats here approximate the high-gloss playfulness of peak T-Pain. But the two artists do share a baseline unpredictability: On “Project Nigga,” which marries the turn-of-the-century Cash Money sound to the less quantized mutation of it that dominated LA during the Trump years, Greedo spends much of the song buried deep in the pocket only to emerge with a tossed-off coda. In it, he notes that his role model is not someone from his own life, but rather “Boosie—and [he] never met the nigga.”

The accents Dnyc3 adds to this school of production are subtle but delightfully eccentric: It sounds like there’s a chirping cricket trapped within the defiantly synthetic beat for “She Got It.” Greedo responds by couching his most overtly pop ideas inside songs too plaintive or violent for radio or by burying them at a track’s end.

The signature song on Project T-Pain—and one of the best distillations of the artist’s mission in Greedo’s entire catalog—is “Jordan Downs,” an urgent riff on Juvenile’s “Ha.” Greedo is one of the only rappers from the past quarter-century expressive enough to convincingly sell the original’s taunting-question structure; he has populated the Watts of his imagination with sufficient detail to stand alongside Juve’s Magnolia Projects. True to form, Greedo finds a way to pivot the song into a reflection on the hollow left by gang violence. “You ain’t no OG just ‘cause you 25/You ain’t no killer,” he raps. “You just still alive.”

It can be difficult to revisit Los Angeles hip-hop from this era without feeling a tinge of sorrow. Despite a handful of artists’ persistence, the exhilarating wave from the late 2010s has ebbed, ending too soon as a result of murder and imprisonment. But Greedo’s finest work exists somehow outside of time: He mines the past for component parts he can warp until they’re unrecognizable—until they sound, oddly, like the future.