Griselda - Don't Get Scared Now [2016]

Welcome to one of my many Write-Ups, where I dive into a contextual history of a project from an artist, while also breaking down the different parts worth mentioning. Come over to my Write-Ups page for a list of all of the work I’ve done so far.

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Every collective has it’s beginning, a place where you can say that the legend has truly begun. Unfortunately, while these groups may go on to create unrivalled pieces of art, there are always senses of “what-ifs?” that go along with people coming together to create. What if Killah Priest was selected to be in the clan instead of Masta Killah? What if Capital Steez has lived to see out Pro Era gain even more success? What if Dre, Cube, and Eazy had never gone the ways they did? These questions will obviously never get answers, but we can look back at these moments, and all the great music that it has given us, and, while still celebrating the achievements, consider the what-if. Going into the 2020’s, Griselda is set to make a massive impact, both as a group and amongst their individual members, but the picture for the collective wasn’t like this back in 2016. Back then, the door to speculate who was in Griselda was wide open, with people like al.divino, Tha God Fahim, and Mach-Hommy being names that were thrown around as those who were “in the crew”. As we now know, Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, and Benny the Butcher are the three members of Griselda (Daringer too, can’t forget him), but their first album as a crew, Don’t Get Scared Now, told a very different story for the future, while also establishing some of the groups most distinctive traits.

Conway the Machine’s Reject 2 in late 2015 was where the Griselda wave officially “took off”, and contained all of the characters that would shape the future of the group. Westside Gunn makes multiple appearances with his brother, Benny comes back from a few year hiatus to drop a verse on Hitler Wears Hermes II a few months earlier and Reject 2, and Mach-Hommy makes his Griselda debut dropping a verse on Beloved. The pieces were in place going into 2016, and once the top of the year came, the group put the pedal to the metal and didn’t let up for the entire year. The Flygod released Roses are Red…So Is Blood, There’s God and There’s Flygod, Praise Both, and Hitler Wears Hermes 4 as mixtapes, and Conway and Westside together as Hall & Nash released an EP by themselves and with Big Ghost in Griselda Ghost. That’s not even to mention Westside Gunn’s debut studio MONSTER of an album, the classic FLYGOD, which if Reject 2 didn’t get peoples attention then this album was the one that truly put people on to the Griselda steez. Don’t Get Scared Now dropped right before all of the collaborative material like Hall & Nash and Griselda Ghost, and before Benny made his triumphant return to projects with My First Brick in October of that year, so at this point people had heard chatter that people like Mach and Benny were now Griselda, and were just trying to decipher who made the cut.

With his trademark Haitian flag covering his face, Mach-Hommy would go on to run an equal, but entirely different lane of hip-hop. His work with DJ Muggs in 2019 deserves special praise.

The people that came together to make this project, in the end, were Gunn, Conway, and Mach, each of whom brought their own brand of rap that meshed together to create a group energy that was entirely different from the energy we ended up getting on What Would Chinegun Do, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just different. While Wwcd relied on a sort of subdued malice that lurked behind every bar and instrumental, Don’t Get Scared Now presented a trio of emcees that is much more in-your-face and rabid, emcees that had a hell of a lot more to prove to you than established underground veterans in 2019. Now, the album is only 6 tracks long, but at almost half an hour of material each track (minus Daringer’s one minute interlude) is at or above 5 minutes, which seems like a lots of time to pack in bars, but the thing that made Griselda so special is that they didn’t have to attack you with bar after bar after bar; these slow, lumbering, monstrous beats contain a lot of instrumental space, and with the emcees taking their time with extremely paced deliveries these tracks are an exercise in ambiance and atmosphere more than anything. That’s not to say that West/Machine/Hommy are lacking, but rather they are taking the emphasis off of their flows, and shifting that energy into microphone presence and ruthlessness (and in Westside’s case, adlibs). And, just like Wwcd years later, the diversity found within its three individual members was something to behold, but with one huge difference in lineup.

With Mach-Hommy quickly becoming a fan favorite for his wordplay and delivery, people were hyped that this rap crew was growing to include some of the genre’s most interesting voices, and speculation abounded at who would be the next to be inducted into the group. Whenever Don’t Get Scared Now dropped billed as a Westside Gunn x Conway the Machine x Mach-Hommy release, people seemingly received their answer as to the newest member of the group. However, across the five new tracks, Mach only had full verses on three of them, with the second to last track being a Hall & Nash track, and the final track being a Conway solo track. Obviously, this was a spur of the moment release, with the three tracks being made with Mach, and the other two tracks from the vault thrown on to make a full-sized project, but Mach even being on here and being referred to as Griselda was enough to think of how this movement was now so much richer and special. His verses on here are some of his most aggressive and dangerous of his career, with his completely unheard-of wordplay and word choices paired with his rock-solid rhyme-schemes making him the GZA to West & Conway’s Ghost & Rae. His verse on the opening track on here, Chyna, is one of my personal favorite verses in his career, and is the best verse on Don’t Ge Scared Now for sure. Just writing out “Wow, I see what it take now / intelligencia on some balenciaga shit with a tre-pound / I bet your bottom bitch is a playground / no interrogative no pot to piss that cause a n***a to spray rounds” and “I flip the raw fish like ceviche / I getcha song lit like a DJ/ Wes’ get me to hit ya dog shit like I’m Wee-Bey” doesn’t do justice to the force Mach delivers these words with, and his clear and commanding voice made him stand out amongst the wreckage of the beat and the different deliveries from Gunn and Conway.

Westside Gunn (left) & Conway the Machine (right), aka Hall & Nash, not only have released dozens of projects between them in the past five years, but they also have dozens of features, willing to collaborate with almost anyone in the underground

Conway the Machine had been seen as the groups’ lyrical heavy hitter leading up to the release of this record, with his performances on Reject 2 being seen as a revival of the lyrical ferocity that rappers like Kool G Rap and 50 Cent could conjure. When people learned about the fact that he was shot in the head , making it harder for him to talk let alone rap, the sense of ease and effortlessness to his raps gained a new level of respect. While Mach takes first place in the inventive and out-of-pocket word usage, Conway is still the king of evoking that vintage sense of mafioso rap, flexing on the mic with threats that you absolutely take seriously. With Mach, it can feel like lyrical exercises, written and well-constructed to hit in a satisfying way; but with the Machine nothing is written, everything is off the cuff, and everything he says is delivered in matter-of-fact growl that gives you the sense that all of this is real, from the drug dealing to the gang violence, which is a feeling that few rappers can ever successfully pull off.  With people like Freddie Gibbs and Biggie Smalls, you don’t question their stories, and Conway can be included amongst those who are to be taken at face value. I mean shit just go back to the very first words spoken on this project, “Smack ya favorite rapper teeth down his fucking throat / gun big enough to sink a fuckin boat”: who opens with this shit if they aren’t ready to get into the dirt and fuck some shit up? He also has his own solo track on here with Benz Window, featuring the late Prodigy, that sounds like it could have easily fit into the mysterious tension of Reject 2. Conway performs two amazing verses and spread out hook on this track, which is even more of an indication this was meant to be his own track.

That brings us to Westside Gunn who, having proved himself as a solid rapper on his debut album FLYGOD just two short months earlier, coasts into this album with his most outlandish tendencies showing brightly, doubling down on the aspects of his rap character that made him one of the most unique in the game at the time. It’s a focus on creative one-liners, over-the-top violence and fashion references, and more adlibs than our little minds can comprehend that set the Flygod on a different level than Mach and Con, being in a way the “Griselda Glue” that holds the whole tape together into a distinct product. Obviously Mach-Hommy and Conway the Machine can hold their own in the rap sphere, but the Griselda brand is taking the dusty, gutter hip-hop and infusing it with beauty in a way that other groups just can’t do. I’ve mentioned this before, that the tenets of GxFR are Fashion, Art, and the Streets, an ideology to approaching music that Westside Gunn, even way back in 2016, was looking to build into a cultural phenomenon. “Just copped the rollie with all ones”, “baby I the crib cryin’, they gon’ have to scrape off the brains off the toy box / where the safe at?”, “Dopeman, dopeman, give me a hit” and many more represent Gunn’s quest to spit shit that Griselda Blanco herself would look at with an approving nod. For everything that Griselda achieved in 2016, it was decisively Westside Gunn’s year, with 4 solo projects and 3 group projects within ten months, everyone one of which deserve places amongst Griselda’s best releases.

Almost all of Daringer’s work in the past 6 years has been with Griselda and it’s members. He is truly establishing his sound as a calling card of the Griselda brand

At this point Daringer was crucial to what people considered “the Griselda sound”, and while many people (even to today) leave him out of the group discussion, Daringer was and remains the heart and soul of the group; he produced the entirety of Don’t Get Scared Now (minus one Alchemist track), and the sounds found here are the purest distillation of his sound to date. While Reject 2 had a small amount of variance in it’s sound to reflect an entire project, the five beats that he provides here are some of the most identifiable beats he’s created to date, reflecting his mastery of the most important building block of a hip-hop instrumental: the loop. Daringer was an incredibly forward-thinking individual in the sense that he could hear the most benign of vocal passages and hear an opportunity for a chop, where everyone else would still be waiting for a good moment to cut in. You’ll hear on the first three tracks of the album (Chyna, StoveTops, and Visionware) a focus on low BPM, dusty and buried drums, and a single selection of usually one very visible and repetitive sample. Chyna with it’s chopped guitar solo that surges with electricity and feedback, shows that the simplicity of the main sample, paired with a subtle string embellishment, is all you need to create a provocative and memorable beat. StoveTops continues that slower BPM, but instead of the forward aggression of a guitar solo substitutes barbarism with the tension of tightly looped string drone. That’s it. Dusty drums over a loop (with a very occasional bell and whistle to provide ambiance) is all that Daringer needs to create a compelling canvas of sound. It’s like giving Vincent Van Gogh the color grey to paint with exclusively, but he can still manipulate and contort the color to make something incredible. Visionware takes it to the vocal sample level, with a *very* tightly looped sample repeating throughout the entire 5 minute track; the way he usually approaches vocal samples is very cold, taking words out of context in many cases and looping them in ways that might test some people’s patience in terms of an instrumental that doesn’t really develop as much as revel in its loop. But I think that’s where the “art” of GxFR really comes forward, because it really is an artform to go beyond the simple sampling techniques of finding “what would make the best loop”, instead bending something like dialogue or a yell into something that can be rapped over. More than any other album Daringer has produced, I think Don’t Get Scared Now represents to a T that sound that Daringer basically coined in today’s underground that people have been trying to make sense of and copy for the past 4 years.

We all know how this very prolific time in Griselda’s history eventually turned out: Westside Gunn and Conway grew to be the faces of this new movement, their cousin Benny the Butcher officially joined the fold around the time Don’t Get Scared Now was released, and “the Griselda sound” became a hot commodity in the underground, with people seeking production placements from Daringer more than an Alchemist beat it seems (who also had a beat on here by the way, Ajax, which was pretty good for what it was as a two-sided track). Early cosigns like Prodigy, who not only appeared on this project but would also go on to feature on Elcamino’s self-titled debut EP and Conway’s G.O.A.T. in 2017, would start rolling in from all corners of hip-hop, culminating in the group signing to Shady Records in March of 2017. For all of the positive building done, there were also some losses, maybe not from the perspective of Griselda looking backward, but for us here on the ground wandering “what if?” Mach-Hommy would eventually fall out of favor with Griselda as a whole, being in essence replaced by Benny, and would continue in good favor with the group until about a year later in 2017 whenever his relationships with people like al.divino and especially Tha God Fahim caused some major tensions within the collective. Since then, besides a few one-off quips on IG or whatever, they’ve all been pretty mum on what exactly happened, but suffice it to say that Mach and the Griselda boys aren’t looking to get back into the studio together any time soon. Which is a damn shame. All we can do is look back to Don’t Get Scared Now for one of the clearest pictures of what exactly Griselda is as a movement, and, while appreciating the amazing and genre-shaping route the group has taken, dwell on one of modern hip-hop’s biggest what-ifs.

YouTube/whoisconwaythemachine.com