In its replacement of feel-good party jams with protest music about race and sexual politics, S**till Brazy occasionally scans as My Krazy Life Goes Woke. “Blacks & Browns” weighs the “but what about black on black crime?” question against the impacts of classism and racism. He also flashes a nascent social consciousness. “Who Shot Me?”, the song that reflects on the incident that left him hospitalized last June, is easily the emotional centerpiece of Still Brazy its meticulous recounting of potential perpetrators shows off the sharpness of YG’s writing: “Having nightmares of me coming for dude/Having a hard time putting together two and two/They was in a brand-new truck, somebody sent them dudes.” The rest of the album spirals out from this incident, finding him consumed by paranoia, ducking foes both real and perceived, questioning friendships, and watching his pockets.
*The album is mostly a status update, examining how the collision between YG the gangster and YG the semi-famous millionaire disrupts his life in Compton. He uses his economical rap style, which boils every concept down to its root, to swat away an ongoing barrage of assaults, some brought on both his new life, others by his old one (on the title track, he shouts, “Why everybody want a piece of my pie?!”) Aside from being a finely crafted personal statement, Still Brazy studies the psychology behind being a celebrity gangster, the ever-present fear of retaliatory violence, or the risk inherent in simply getting caught at the stop light on the wrong side of town sporting the wrong colors. These are the subjects that plague him on *Still Brazy. “Gang-related” shootings in Compton are sadly routine when near the set of a YG video, they can be a coincidence or a coordinated assassination attempt.
Police believed the shooting to be gang related. Last month, shots interrupted the video shoot for his single “Thug” with rapper AD. Since then he’s mostly used the attack to self-mythologize, boasting that he’s “ hard to kill” and claiming that he left the hospital that night and continued working on his album the next day.
But YG’s life has gotten crazier since then: Last year, he was shot by an unknown assailant at his Los Angeles recording studio. YG’s debut My Krazy Life was a hardcore gangsta rap album, but the Compton rapper didn't present himself like a kingpin: On songs like “Sorry Momma,” he self-identified as a small-time house raider and set-claimer, a cog in a much bigger machine just looking to survive (and party in the meantime).
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