SONG OF THE DAY: Serpent's Whisper

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Stalley secretly became one of my favorite rappers this past year. The Tell the Truth Shame the Devil series of EPs, from which this song comes from, is fuckin’ great. I am mostly prejudiced against Ohio, in all forms, because it’s one of the most godforsaken places ever. Not really midwest, not really east, not really Appalachia (fuck you J.D. Vance), not really anything... just a big ol’ mass of kind of a bunch of different things. And yet some wonderful things have come out of Ohio, with stealth. Stalley is that classic industrial shithole rapper though, who got signed to big thangs (Mayback Music Group) but ain’t do shit really with that, and somehow ended up being way better once he was off the corporate chain. People who grew up steeped in struggle, which all rappers claim but there’s different layers to struggle – the struggle spectrum is not a binary (which is why people always play oppression olympics with each other, to prove how oppressed they are, when usually the types who play that are from the lighter end of the spectrum), but once you know that struggle deeply, to your DNA, through generations, lolol shit like “maybach music” is actually corny as fuck to your molecular make-up. So you end up getting dropped, or fucking it up by making poor choices (always poor choices), and you end up releasing a sick ass series of EPs about shaming the devil on your own Blue Collar Gang label.

This song really speaks to me, as does much of Stalley's 2018 body of work. Motherfucker is on some shit.