AOTY #9: Westside Gunn - Pray For Paris [2020]

Welcome to my Album of the Year highlights! I’ll give you a little run down with a brief history to start, show you the tracklist (with the tracks in bold being my favorites) with all of the featured guests (if any), give you some descriptors that might make you more inclined to check it out, and I’ll provide links to stream/buy the project down at the bottom. Enjoy!

The first of three different Flygod projects in 2020 (and among the dozen Griselda projects overall), Westside Gunn got the GxFR train rolling in earnest in April with Pray For Paris, hot off the heels of the first Griselda release of the year: Lulu from Conway. It seemed like the guys were taking a break from the normal programming after an amazing 2019, but four months into the year and Pray For Paris was only beginning of a year that marked multiple new members to the collective, quality project after quality project, and features for anyone who could provide the bag. But this album was different; Pray For Paris was everything elegant and gutter about Westside Gunn distilled into one place, drawing from the refined strengths of Hitler 7 while also not loosing any of the goofy charm of FLYGOD IS AN AWESOME GOD. While Westside Gunn may not be the greatest rapper to walk the earth, his real strengths are presented in projects like these, and those strengths are curation, connections, and beat selection. Only the best beats around make it onto a Gunn project, that you can be sure of, and he brings along a whole fucking FLEET of people operating at godly levels of performances: Freddie Gibbs, Joey Bada$$, Roc Marciano, Tyler, The Creator, and all of the other Griselda members make legendary appearances on here, making the collaborative strength alone something to behold. Griselda was in top form last year, and Pray For Paris was among it’s most impressive showings.

Tracklist

1. 400 Million Plus Tax

2. No Vacancy

3. George Bondo (Feat. Conway the Machine & Benny the Butcher)

4. 327 (Feat. Billie Esco, Joey Bada$$, & Tyler, The Creator)

5. French Toast (Feat. Wale & Joyce Wrice)

6. Euro Step

7. Allah Sent Me (Feat. Conway the Machine & Benny the Butcher)

8. $500 Ounces (Feat. Freddie Gibbs & Roc Marciano)

9. Versace

10. Claibourne Kick (Feat. Boldy James)

11. Shawn Vs. Flair

12. Party wit Pop Smoke (Feat. Keisha Plum)

13. Le Djoliba (Feat. Cartier William)

There is power in a picture like this. For those of you who have been following Griselda, this shit can seem unreal. But, at the end of the day, with the drive of someone like Westside Gunn, this shit was destiny.

Recommended if you like:

Fat Joe, dreamy boom-bap instrumentals, Raekwon, amazing sample loops, The Alchemist, wild and nasally emcees, Danny Brown, tons of features, Ghostface Killah

Here’s my original write-up of Pray For Paris:

Westside Gunn - Pray For Paris [2020]

↓ Listen to Pray For Paris ↓

Spotify/YouTube/Apple Music