The Bronx rapper pulls you into his orbit with dark humor and trademark absurdity on his latest project, more focused than any of his previous work.
Rx Papi doesn’t sugarcoat anything. In the past few weeks, a particularly bleak chunk of his song “Cousin Tito” has circled the internet: “So high, I don’t think I’m gonna get home/Might run off the road and kill myself,” he raps. “Sometimes I wake up, wanna kill myself/How would you felt if I killed myself?” The lines read extremely grim on paper, but when rapped in a cavernous deadpan somewhere between Lil B and Max B, they become dark comedy. No matter how far Rx Papi pulls you into his troubled thoughts, he weaves in his trademark absurdity, rapping in a loud bark that often evolves mid-song into a full-throated scream. The joy of listening to him is bearing witness to an artist at his freest, seemingly unpolluted by any kind of refinement or recalibration from the industry.
That energy seeps into his latest album 100 Miles & Walk’in, where he appears to demo flows, voices, and cadences in real-time, mirroring his anxious storytelling. The record is a mere blip in his catalog—he released eight projects in 2020—and yet Walk’in feels more focused than any of his previous works. Besides a lone feature from Detroit rapper Boldy James, Papi carries track after track (nearly all of them hookless) on his own, sometimes fancying himself a sort of Upstate M. Night Shyamalan. On “Dead Man’s Letter,” he recalls getting so high he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror, then going to his bathroom to find his own body bloody and beat up in the tub.
More often, Rx Papi’s songs are delirious mood boards, mixing moments of paranoia with humor. He’ll mumble about taking Percs to relax his muscles before flat-out screaming that his pockets are “fatter than Mrs. Puff” (“SouthSide Mike”). There’s the middle of “One Last Dance,” where he ties off a stanza about his love-hate relationship with Jordans by saying, “I don’t miss the shot, I’m Michael Jordan/Walked out and stabbed you, Michael Myers.”
Like a long-running sitcom, his music gets funnier the more you dig in, often self-referential and reliant on tropes. There’s Auntie, a character who pops up on almost every track. There are his 5.56 shells and his Glock that looks like Bernie Mac or Crunchy Black based on the day. Then there’s “Walk in This Bitch,” which confirms there’s a seemingly infinite number of ways to “walk in this bitch.” Across the album, Papi walks in this bitch like an improbably extensive cast of characters, including Mystikal, Freddy Krueger, Styles P, Steve-O, DJ Clue, Ox from Belly, Rico from Paid in Full, God, a dead man, and John Wayne. “I walk in this bitch like John Wayne/I don’t know shit about John Wayne,” he raps on “Rush Hour,” on which producer DiorDaze’s crater-deep low end threatens to blow out speakers.
In general, Papi picks quality beats from the SoundCloud trenches that are suitable for him to be as loud and angry as he desires. The best is JXHNSCXTT’s for “Terry,” which sounds like death; the strangest is St. Los’s for the Pet Shop Boys-sampling “East End Boys.” It’s a bunch of musical ideas that cohere mostly because Papi, like a large planet, sucks them—and you—into his orbit. Some of them should’ve stayed in his inbox—the flimsy opener “A Man Apart (Intervention)”—but when everything is clicking, it’s hard to turn away.
The catch of black comedy, of course, is you’re not sure you should be laughing, but with the way Rx Papi so convincingly pulls it off, he takes that choice away entirely.
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