Your Old Droog - Jewelry [2019]

“I all I hear is: Culture this, culture that / the cultureless talk culture crap from a cozy cul-de-sac / but why my last shit ain’t take off yet? / Kulture ain’t nothing but the child of Cardi B and Offset”.

I’m torn. On one hand I’m definitely in the camp of placing stock into the concept of “the culture”, but on the other I can see where Your Old Droog is coming from, with not only one but TWO albums this year that “haven’t taken off yet” despite their clear furtherance of the culture. For the purpose of this write-up, and to respect Droog’s views on this, I’m not going to bring up “the culture” at all, because YOD as an emcee has many, many more things to praise. However, I think there’s another kind of culture that he has tapped into, one that I will in fact talk about, and one that seems to be much more important to Droog in his latest album: the culture of ancestry, heritage, and ethnicity. On Jewelry, Your Old Droog presents himself as a rapper who, going forward, is wearing *his* culture on his sleeve, replacing the music-centered notion of culture with his own Jewish-Ukrainian background. Across this project, released on the first day of Hanukkah, Droog not only litters references to the holiday, but also the details of growing up Jewish, how Jewish families operate in America today, and how Jewish culture and hip-hop is more attached than one might think. For someone who’s rapping abilities have been the focus of so many tracks and albums before, to see Droog incorporate elements of his own personal culture is so satisfying to see. Before Jewelry, I saw Your Old Droog as one of the best rappers that Hip-Hop had to offer (his first album from 2019, It Wasn’t Even Close, was my #4 Album of the Year); after Jewelry, I see him as one of the best *artists* that Hip-Hop has to offer, completing his identity as a well-rounded and intensely-focused emcee.

It Wasn’t Even Close, Droog’s first album in 2019 (my #4 AOTY for 2019) marked the beginning of an ongoing shift in his sound.

There is one thing that needs to be addressed before going into the details of Jewelry, and that is the astoundingly fruitful relationship between Your Old Droog and Mach-Hommy, who seem to have become close friends and collaborators over the past year. Mach executive produced It Wasn’t Even Close, Droog’s first album this year, and with his direction I could see a clear shift in Droog’s sonics to a colder, more gruff sound that was consistent with the low-fi seedy underbelly of New York’s modern underground. It worked so well with Droog’s voice, obscure references, and hilarious one-liners that I thought he would stick to this style for the foreseeable future. Not even three months later, however, he takes us back to his earlier days for his second release of 2019, Transportation. With much of the production on here being handled by Mono En Stereo, Transportation felt like an older Droog album at heart, and while I wasn’t disappointed by this project, I felt like the direction that Mach was leading him in with It Wasn’t Even Close would lead to something truly profound in today’s rap game. Jewelry, which sees Mach-Hommy returning in his capacity as executive producer, is that realization of the potential of the direction shift, with a combination of IWEC’s murkiness and Transportation’s goofy irreverence giving this project the most sonically complete package of what Droog has to offer going forward. I think (and I’m not trying to be disrespectful to Droog’s own solo grind) Mach-Hommy was the key to unlocking Your Old Droog’s potential; he seems to have shown him, through his own reverence of his Haitian culture, the benefits of pouring not only one’s talents for rapping, but also the essence of your heritage and personal culture into your art to build something beautiful. I hope that these two never stop collaborating.

Your Old Droog on the microphone is a familiar sound, one infused with the spirit of the legends of the late 80’s and 90’s. But while you may find that the rap styles are familiar, you probably have never heard anyone that is this brilliant, this technical with his wordplay, and this deep with his references since Black Thought and Pharaohe Monche. I wouldn’t say he’s as aggressive as those two emcees often get, with the fire towards the mic replaced by a paced sternness, bathed in smoke and rasp; I like to imagine his style like Mos Def, if Yasiin lived in a bodega and exclusively watched movies and TV shows from the 90’s. Droog just has that sound of a psychopathic thinker, who is constantly in search of clever ways to state something that would otherwise just be innocuous nonsense, but when he says it you’ve never heard anything more dope.

Although Mach-Hommy (who executive-produced Jewelry) usually plays it low-key and incognito, his meeting earlier this year with Jay-Z shows that his entirely unique steez is turning heads industry-wide.

While before Jewelry most of the lyrics you would hear would be insanely clever references and turns of phrase, on this newest album you get that *and* an enormous influence from Jewish culture, which manifests in the form of lyrics like “Y’all just like the rap / I’m like the rap Sacha Beren Cohen”, or “Dude’s just mad they was passed over like Fredo / or how I pulled up to Passover with a solid gold dreidel”. The way he can seamlessly incorporate his culture into blistering flexes shows how deep this man’s mind runs. He can also get more introspective and nostalgic in his bars, like on the ode to his childhood on Stoop Kid, and Mrs. Cloutfire where he angrily reminiscences on past pop culture and discrimination, coming to the humorous conclusion that “if you don’t like Droog then you’re anti-Semitic”. But tracks like Babushka II and The Greatest to Ever Do It existing as lyrical exercises are still appreciated, because while he is unquestionably capable of focused narratives, proving why people love him as wordsmith will never get old to me. Where I think Droog is the strongest on Jewelry is on his storytelling tracks. Diamonds is a story that goes through a career of a performer that takes a dramatically unexpected turn; the fact that Droog is able to tell this kind of a story with all kinds of engrossing details in a three-minute track shows his amazing structure game. It took him time to write out the parts of that story into a three-verse frame, and all of the story beats hit as well as if someone was showing you the film.

But while Diamonds is a phenomenal track in it’s own right as a older style Your Old Droog track, Generations is the crown jewel of Jewelry in terms of rapping, storytelling, and relevance to his new focus on his heritage. The track follows a family through multiple generations, framing it with a man who lives in Brooklyn, working very hard to provide for his wife. If you thought that Diamonds was a phenomenal story track, then Generations will genuinely blow you away with the amount of detail packed into less than three minutes. It is a compelling, tragic, and historical story of an immigrant family where America was idolized, but, like anywhere else, the darkness in humankind will make itself known. It is also remarkable as a relevant story to Your Old Droog’s focus on the Jewish culture here in America, and while I can’t say whether or not this story is about Droog’s family, that fact that many people from his native Ukraine could be described by this story shows the most ultimate of reverence to his heritage and the people who he attached himself to so closely.

Quelle Chris is one of the most underrated producers today, with his skills on the boards rivaled only by his skills on the mic.

There are only a few features on here, but most of them contribute to making Jewelry Your Old Droog’s most personal and substantive album. I’ve already mentioned how instrumental Mach-Hommy is to Droog’s continuing vision, and his repeated appearance on the album reinforces how close these two are in their headspaces. The intro song of the record, Shamash, is Mach singing what seems to be some sort of devotional in Hebrew; the fact that Mach could speak Hebrew in any sort of melody is so impressive, but par for the course for someone of his artistry. Desert Eagle sees Dump filling a similar role as he did on his appearance on Funeral Dirge off of It Wasn’t Even Close, getting aggressive with his opening lines about the number of Jews that currently live in Brooklyn; he ties this in with Hip-Hop as a whole by saying streaming is doing nothing for these artists, and that even if all of the Jews in Brooklyn streamed Jewelry it would be a drop in the bucket in comparison to vinyl and pure sales. But Bde is the true show of his amazingly bizarre style which is brash and cryptically ultraviolent, with a flow and rhyme scheme that is impossible to predict; you can listen to his verse over and over again and find something new on every run. Any new verse from MF DOOM is welcome in today’s day and age, and his appearance with Mach on Bde, while not being entirely relevant to the themes or motifs of the record, is another in a short list of phenomenal modern DOOM guest spots. Tha God Fahim appears on Stoop Kid, fitting in well not so much for his lyrical content as much as his nostalgic flow and his warm voice; he does try and bridge that gap between the African-American and the Jewish experience, mirroring some of the same phrases that Droog uses like “kid punched me in the face, told me it’s a free country / but are we really free?”. Matisyahu is an artist that I remember as a sort of traditional Jewish folk musician with a…reggae twist? It’s not the fondest of memories musically, but his appearance here might be the most thematically appropriate on the album, with his feature on Jew Tang being a throaty religious experience. Jew Tang Forever is his moment of shine though; he dominates the majority of the track, and his lyrics are very confrontational and poignant, with one passage in particular going “when they say that we killed the kid/ we know that that’s just a fib”, addressing to common basis for anti-Semitism that the Jewish culture is responsible for the death of Jesus.

Pulling up to Passover with this bad boy is the definition of flexing too hard

The instrumentals on Jewelry are dominated by two names: Quelle Chris (Detroit’s resident monotone) and Tha God Fahim (tatatatatatata), who both contribute to bridge the gap between It Wasn’t Even Close and Transportation into one forward-thinking whole. Tracks like Desert Eagle, The Greatest to Ever Do It, and Babushka II show the clearest influence from IWEC, sounding a lot like tracks that appeared on that album (Funeral Dirge, Ugly Truth, & Babushka respectively). Maybe they play a little *too* close to that album at times sonically, but if it ain’t broke why fix it. Jew Tang Forever and Jew Tang, the closer and opener, are by far the two darkest beats on Jewelry, with the dramatic theatre of the former conveyed through it’s soaring strings and steady drumline, and the industrial bang of the latter hitting you with latent distorted tones and crunchy guitar notes. Generations, as a sort of middle ground between the creeping dread of IWEC and the nostalgia of Transportation, is a true-to-form musical piece, which sounds specifically written by Edan to follow the story that Droog is telling. The soft jazz angle, with the scant drums, and a stable melody that shifts from sentimental guitars to keyboard chords to what sounds like a xylophone, before ending on the initial guitars brings the story full circle; this is true in the end when the reveal and emotional climax of the song is met with a cacophony of all of the previous instruments, cementing this emotional payoff. It’s just such a well-made track on every level. From here, while most of the IWEC-like instrumentals were Fahim’s brain-children, the more Transportation inspired tracks come from Quelle Chris. The noirish Diamonds with the scratched hook and various relevant vocal clips, rubbery bassline, and conked out synths is trademark Quelle behavior, and fits Droog’s storytelling like a glove. Mrs. Cloutfire is a busier cut with cluttered dusty drums and one-off piano flicks; it sounds a lot like a bustling city, specifically trains (which is why I think it’s the most evocative of Transportation on Jewelry). Stoop Kid and the title track are throwback tracks that really play on nostalgia. Stoop Kid sounds specifically created for the concept of the track of growing up in the projects, with it’s sunny grand pianos and tight snares sounding like a coming-of-age movie just getting started. The title is like an old-school funk track played out in a magnificent loop; Droog even mentions African Bambaataa at the beginning of the track, and Quelle really hits that balance of scant and tribal just like he would. Finally, as my favorite instrumental on this damn thing, Bde sees an appearance from DJ Preservation of all people, who channels that Clint Eastwood/western energy with wispy flutes, well placed strings, and these guitar chords that remind me of Hellz Wind Staff off of Wu-Tang Forever for some reason? This instrumental feels elevated and transcendental, like a roller coaster ride around Mt. Olympus.

An argument can be made that Your Old Droog has had the best 2019 of any artist: few others have dropped albums as consistently wowing as his, and fewer still have done so THREE TIMES over, while still maintaining an unmistakably genius pen. But, I think what pushes Your Old Droog into that classic artist territory is this album right here, Jewelry, where he fully embraces his heritage and culture, combining all of his artistic ideas that he’s gone through this year with his new found love for his Jewish/Ukrainian lineage. It gives his music a much more personal and revealing perspective; while I can enjoy a rapper that raps for the sake of proving he’s the best and attributes his wins and skills to “the culture”, I think that substituting the vagueness of “the culture” with *actual* culture that has contributed to building the rapper in question is destined to build an everlasting artist. In that way, I think Your Old Droog has created a convincing argument to why “the culture” as a thing in hip-hop should be disregarded, because whatever hip-hop is at any given moment is always changing, growing, building. But our ancestry? How we grew up? Who and where we come from? That doesn’t change, and drawing from it is something that only *you* can do. It’s probably the only unique thing that people can rap about anymore: *your* experience, and, with Jewelry, Your Old Droog tells his story in a way only he can.

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