BY JACOB "34" KOERTGE • JANUARY 12, 2019

A month removed from the release of Ali, Locksmith continues to shine a light on his veteran talent. The MC’s latest stop finds the Richmond, California native at the helm of DJ Kay Slay’s booth, in which the TeamBackPack staple shows off his fierce freestyle skills. Clocking in at just over 10 minutes, Lock’ delivers a presidential and verbose viewpoint on the state of the Rap nation today over instrumentals from Prodigy’s, Alchemist-produced single, “Keep It Thoro.”

Locksmith drops robust knowledge throughout, honing in and targeting several key, specific points to which he finds to be the most pressing matters regarding the state of Hip-Hop culture. In totality, Locksmith touches on everything from industry fakes, friends who turn snakes, weak content in Rap today, trolls, and moreover, those who negatively impact the culture as a whole. First, Lock’ addresses the generation gap (1:55).

“I assume you got the memo / a symbol to be affected / young ni**as feel disconnected / Old ni**as feel disrespected / This affects the nervous system, essentially kills us all / Pushing poetic poison, fictional Fentanyl / Heard a bunch of y’all rappin’, frontin’ like y’all captains / Throwin’ money around, stuntin’ in y’all caption / Said he was set to kill, really just false actin’ / You call it a record deal, I call it Uncle Tom’s Cabin / Braggin’ and f*ckin’ thoughts / Gassed cause you must’ve bought / Five hundred thousand views, and half of ’em Russian bots / Half of the buzz you got / Stolen from his connections / The other half controllin’ people’s perceptions / Deception is like infection.”

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