Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, weird tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention.
Nino Paid is the quietest rapper I’ve ever met. Getting a word out of him requires the patience of a fisherman. On my first day with him, in a large, faceless apartment complex, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, surrounded by trees and highways, he speaks just loudly enough to be heard across his living room only when he’s playing Call of Duty: Warzone on his Xbox, getting into a verbal dust-up with some sort of nine-year-old. (“Shut the fuck up, I’m gonna beat that ass!”) Otherwise, when I ask Nino a question, he scratches his chin and shifts the thin, gold-tinted frames on his face as he thinks long and hard about a response. I can tell that his mind is racing, but rarely do words come out. Instead, he’ll just smirk or stare longingly, letting the moment pass by.
His apartment is barely furnished—nothing but a sofa, a TV mounted on the wall playing a Netflix procedural on mute, a mound of dirty laundry, and a little weed and a few Xanax bars scattered across the counter. The 22-year-old rapper and his friend Lul Flock9—they met three years ago when they both had nowhere else to go and were staying in the same basement—shut the blinds and pass a blunt back and forth. Soon enough, they close their eyes and throw on Nino’s music: plainspoken, confessional DMV street rap, as dark as it is optimistic. “The music is really an outlet for me,” says Nino. “I’ve been in and out of jail since I was 14. Jail teaches you to be antisocial; you learn you can’t open up to just anyone. It’s different when I’m rapping.”
You can tell. His raps are raw, unfiltered, and deeply personal. “I’m tired of going through pain/I’m thinking I’m destined for greatness or maybe I’m goin’ insane,” he opens “Pain & Possibilities,” the meditative single that made him one of the hottest new stars in the DMV. As a writer, he calls to mind the wounded diary entries of YoungBoy and the druggy introspection of Alternative Trap–era Lucki. He separates himself, though, with music that’s firmly rooted in DMV crank, a popular regional street rap style marked by apocalyptic drums and a menacing, drill-esque delivery. And Nino takes that foundation and softens it with a cloudier beat selection—instrumentals for songs like “Paid” and “Black Ball” sound as if Main Attrakionz mainstays Friendzone grew up in southeast D.C.—and vulnerable rhymes that balance heavy subjects like homelessness and suicidal ideation with earnest flashbacks of romance and getting money.
For the heft and often depressive moods of his music, Nino draws from his chaotic and traumatic childhood. When he was three or four years old, Nino and his three siblings were taken from their parents by D.C. child services and put into the foster care system. There, they were split up into pairs (he was with his younger sister), bouncing around for years and experiencing violent abuse and homelessness. “You know those movies where kids in foster care are getting the same food everyday and getting whooped all the time? That’s what it’s really like,” he admits.
Eventually, he and his sister were adopted by whom he now calls his mother and his late father, with whom he had a complicated relationship. “My mom is a saint,” he says, enlivened when he talks about her. “Doesn’t curse; doesn’t drink. She’s the cook at church; feeds the homeless every month, always taking new kids in, she probably has four or five at her house right now.” Still, despite being more stable than he ever had been, dreams of getting as fly as everyone at school led him to burglaries, which landed him in and out of jail throughout his teens. “My mom was old school, she didn’t believe I needed anything but old clothes from my father,” he remembers. “I still remember the names of the bitches that was laughing at my shoes at school, I didn’t really need to do what I did, but I wasn’t trying to have that.”
Nino’s debut mixtape, April’s Can’t Go Bacc, showcases his brutal honesty, but the project’s tone is just a bit unexpected: It’s like the gentle calm after a hurricane, motivation rap rather than pain rap, which is what makes Nino stand out among so much of the threat-fueled street rap of his region. Throughout the tape, he spits a blend of dark memories and hopeful ambitions, backdropped by dreamy crank variants, with an unpolished intensity that sounds like tears are being held back. “Forget about all of the shit that we all been through/I wanna see all my niggas just laughin’ and vibin’/Nigga, I had a chance with that shit and started rappin’ on Pro Tools,” he nearly shouts on the mixtape-opening “Pain & Possibilities 2.” Lately, he’s even managed to channel his optimism into sensitive party anthems.
The next day, I meet Nino at his mom’s house in Landover, Maryland. Her home, where she has lived for over 40 years, is at the top of a hill so steep that just walking to the backyard is a workout, but, once you’re there, overlooking the cul-de-sac, you have a clean view of the Washington Commanders’ stadium. Comfortable with his home nearby, Nino is also chattier today. He proudly shows me all the handiwork done by his dad, who was a construction worker, including a deck and driveway, and he even cracks a smile when he points out the cameras his mom installed back when he was on house arrest as a teenager and kept trying to sneak in his friends to smoke.
Later, in his Beamer, Nino gives me the neighborhood tour. The basketball court where he used to kick it; the house where his dad grew up; the cribs he knocked off and that also got him busted. After a while, he stops in front of the church where his mom is the cook and spends most of her free time. He went to services for the first time in a minute the Sunday before. The church is on the corner of a residential street, surrounded by green grass and a worn-down fence. He mentions that it was on this same block that his parents met. We sit there for a while as he stitches together memories. I have to lean in to hear him, but the stories are flowing out of him now.
Mixtape of the Week: Klein’s Marked
The new Klein project sounds like you’re standing on the other side of the wall of an Imax theater that has fired up Vin Diesel’s nu-metal action flick XXX. All up and down Marked are ripping guitars and faded, gravelly noises. Similar to the last Tirzah album, the London tinkerer and disruptor’s latest feels like one constantly morphing song that keeps teasing a euphoric drop that never comes. Instead, you find satisfaction in the intricacies, such as the scratches on “Drugs Won’t Work (Like Mother Like Son)” or the the voice that recalls Voldemort’s whispers on “nightwatch.” It’s a bonkers way to spend 45 minutes.
500, Stoner Pimpson, Papo2oo4, and Subjxct 5: “Windy City Gyros”
I’m ready to call Subjxct 5 one of the hottest producers on the East Coast right now. Have you heard the new generation Swizz Beatz joint he made for Papo2oo4’s “Space Jam”? It sounds like it should be the loading screen music for a new Def Jam: Fight for NY. What about the way the Jersey producer seamlessly laced those soul-stirring gospel vocals into Wiki and Navy Blue’s “One More Chance”? Sorry to be blasphemous, but it gave me shades of Kanye behind the boards on Common’s “Faithful” (a hilariously batshit Common verse, by the way). Now it’s the beat he made for the new posse cut “Windy City Gyros.” As Chicago’s 500 and Stoner Pimpson and Jersey’s Papo get to work, Subjxct’s backdrop is unfussy, with only galvanizing strings and a drip-drop of percussion that sounds like a slow leak from your ceiling. If it was 2005, Styles P would be on this saying he’s a hustler in 15 different ways, but the three rappers here do a good job of holding things down—even if they should have gone on longer so the beat didn’t have to stop.
Exodus1900 and Zootzie: “Shopping”
There’s a Presbyterian church in Ridgewood scoring a few extra dollars by hosting underground rap and noise shows, and last weekend I walked into the nave, where a few teenagers were gathered around the rapper Sellasouls crouched on the ground like Gollum. There, Sellasouls, with their long hair obscuring their face, mostly did a bunch of ghoulish, rave-ready hissing as if they were speaking in code. It felt like a spirit were being summoned, or that at any moment the music would stop and someone would be chosen as sacrifice. Cool, I guess?
The next set I vibed with a bit more: Their name was Exodus1900, and they mostly grunted over high-speed, overlapping beats that were straight-up wild. Exodus even got a small mosh circle going among the unusually sober (no drinking or smoking allowed in the church) and intimate crowd. I went home and fired up Exodus’ SoundCloud page; it’s full of glitchy, dark, bugged-out music. The song that most grabbed my attention is “Shopping” with Zootzie, mostly because it feels like waking up after a night of drinking to your little cousin playing Mario Kart at full blast. It’s such a collision of sound effects that I can barely hear what Exodus and Zootzie are saying. I have no idea where I would even listen to a song like this, but I bet it would go off in the church.
Protect: “RIP Takeoff”
The saying used to be that rappers wish they were basketball players and basketball players wish they were rappers, but I think I’ve found an update: Rappers wish they were Twitch streamers and Twitch streamers wish they were rappers. Enter Protect, who isn’t a streamer, though he is the first signee of a popular one named BruceDropEmOff who I won’t pretend to know anything about. (One of his recent videos uploaded to YouTube is a reaction to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, naturally.)
Considering that streamers have already become rap’s newest and most corrupted gatekeepers, the backstory made me want to check out before I had even heard anything, but I didn’t and now a bunch of breezy, melodic Protect songs have fallen into my rotation, such as “RIP Takeoff.” It’s nothing groundbreaking, just easy-listening flexing in the style of the post-Pi’erre rappers orbiting beatmakers TDF and Perc40. As always, the beat makes it. Here, it’s producer mayday’s rumbling drums and synths that bring to mind a UFO invasion. It sounds cool enough that I’m willing to put up with a hell of a lot more streamers finding entry ways into rap.
Audi Money: “Baby Gangsta”
Surprise, surprise, Detroit might have another one. He’s named Audi Money, and he sort of sounds like 42 Dugg meets Cash Money’s Turk. Before this week, I had heard a few songs that didn’t do anything for me, but, on his latest single, “Baby Gangsta,” he starts to figure it out, sliding over a bassline so funky that it made me go fire up some vintage DJ Battlecat. As is the way in Detroit, Audi Money is a casual shit talker; “Baby Gangsta” is barely over a minute yet packed with disrespect. But what really makes the song go are a few seemingly inconsequential moments: when he speeds up his flow out of nowhere and stops rhyming for a few seconds, and the high-pitched squawk he teases for a blip. I can’t wait to hear what he sounds like when it’s all fully unleashed.
