Steve 'Flash' Juon“Marlo? You know I’m with Avon right? Stringer Bell? Can we talk?”
You’re not going to have a hard time earning my appreciation when you sample a snippet of conversation between Bodie Broadus and Marlo Stanfield from The Wire. It’s only in retrospect that show has come to be so highly regarded, but even when it came out its gritty and realistic depiction of the Baltimore drug trade did not go unnoticed. Rochester rap stalwart RXKNephew assumes your familiarity with the show on the song “Back From the Dead,” off the similarly and eerily named “I Recently Died and Came Back to Life,” and at least in my case he wasn’t wrong to do so.
The calm, cool yet menacing way actor Jamie Hector delivered Marlo’s reply sticks with you even if you only watched the episode once. “I need you to walk back up there and pack up your people. I’m being a gentleman about it for the moment.” The fact he says all of this while swinging a golf club in the middle of a sidewalk adds yet another layer of tension. Marlo is acting like he’s above it all, preferring (for the moment) to avoid violence, but it’s implied he could just as easily put that iron right across Bodie’s skull if he was so inclined. If I’m being honest hearing this at the end of RXK’s song kind of makes me want to review the HBO show and not the album, so I need to get my focus back here.
“Junky Money” is exactly what you’d expect from RXK if you’re familiar with his prolific output. He’s like the upstate New York version of Christopher Bridges, spitting effortless bars with a familiar vocal tone but an unfamiliar level of menace. “I’m not the one you can roll on” quips RXK, and then he actually name checks the aforementioned rapper with the bar “Bitch I will act a fool like Ludacris!” The fact he made the reference tells you he recognizes the similarity and isn’t hiding from it. Maybe this is what Bridges would sound like if he was from the East coast and not Atlanta (although he was born in Illinois). Anyway RXK is “Mr. Official” all throughout this short release.
The only problem with this song is that RXK becomes a bit repetitive in his lyrical style, not catching that he repeatedly starts making lists of things and spitting them like bars. “5 grams, 10 grams, 20 grams, 30 grams, bundled up.” “I got Glock 40, Glock 17, Glock 19, Glock 21.” Maybe he was just freestyling his way through the verses instead of writing anything down. Given how much material he releases year to year I don’t even think I could blame him. If he had to write every single verse down he couldn’t keep up his prodigious output.
The title track of “I Recently Died and Came Back to Life” ends up being the best song here accidentally or on purpose. RXK sounds super focused and super pissed off, vowing “I can’t argue with nobody, I got a move to make.” I much prefer this version of RXK to the one that has made music about COVID-19 conspiracy theories. You talk about dying and coming back to life right? I mean that’s how people who wound up on a ventilator and survived feel. To me that shit is not a joke but the lack of fucks RXK gives about who he offends or why is part of his appeal — take it or leave it.
At only six songs and just over 21 minutes long, this is not the longest album in RXK’s catalogue, but that’s part of what sets him apart from fellow prolific rapper Lil B. Brandon often doesn’t now when to say when and keeps going until he bogs his albums down with boring repetitive mediocrity over banal self-production. The shorter and tighter RXK keeps his releases, the more you get the feeling he was being selective about what was worth putting out, even if he was rapping a stream-of-consciousness freestyle when he recorded it. I appreciate that he knows what works and what doesn’t and curates the music for us so we don’t have to. Thanks RXK, much respect.