How Ty Money made one of the best rap records of the past year

“Women losing kids, doing interviews on the news, whole crowd on the side,” he raps. “Older folks stay inside till we lose a child, then the whole town come alive.” The song packs a lot of anger and grief into its brief running time, and just past the video’s two-minute mark—as Money’s final words echo and fade—McDonald spins and falls to the pavement, pierced by the first of 16 shots. Seconds later, the words “Rest in peace Laquan McDonald” appear on the screen.

When it came out, “United Center” felt like such a clear reflection of the heightened emotions in the air as thousands protested in Chicago’s streets that I assumed Money had written the song in a rush after seeing the McDonald footage. But in fact he’d recorded it five months earlier, drawing on a lifetime of watching kids like him die. “United Center” is vivid enough in its grasp of segregation, poverty, and racist policing practices that it works just as well as commentary on a specific, well-known tragedy. “It’s like, same shit, different season—and that tripped me up,” Money says. “I almost cried. I had a tear running down my eye when I first synched the video.”

The power of “United Center” wouldn’t have surprised anyone who’d heard Money’s third mixtape, Cinco de Money, which came out May 5. (He’d released mostly freestyles in the interim.) Throughout Cinco de Money his fiery street-life stories (though less overtly political than “United Center”) dig deep and hit home over and over. Andrew Barber of Chicago hip-hop site Fake Shore Drive was hooked in minutes. “After the first song, I was completely blown away,” he says. “This kid is one of the most talented—if not the most talented—lyricists in the city right now. He’s a high-caliber MC; he can paint really vivid pictures with his words. He brings these street scenarios to life and describes them in a way other people don’t.”

In just a couple lines, Money can evoke, say, the anxiety of seeing your fortunes evaporate: on “Viet Cong” he raps, “Runnin’ out of money / I ain’t ever seen it, like a unicorn.” Raybon unloads truckloads of syllables in a fast, fluid flow that zigzags between beats. Like BB-8 in The Force Awakens, he can switch pace and direction dramatically while barely seeming to swerve at all. On “Come Again” he even holds his own next to Twista, longtime king of supersonic stanzas.

Money’s savvy and style help listeners empathize with the characters in his tales of dread and misery—he seems to care about his people, despite their problems, and he can shine new light on old subjects. In “Rickey Killa” he raps from the perspective of the shooter in 1991’s Boyz n the Hood who murders the golden-boy student athlete played by Morris Chestnut, granting the nameless character dimension by exploring how his horrific act of violence seeps into his life: “Try ‘n take my mind off the nigga Rickey / Hit my homie, told him let’s do lunch or something / Coolin’ at the spot / Eyes on the watch / Eatin’ in the lot / Fries in the pot.” Raybon’s rapid rapping underlines the killer’s paranoia and guilt, and his juxtaposition of the movie’s dramatically violent plot with this sort of mundane daily detail makes it easier to imagine the shooter’s life and grant him his humanity.

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