Available on: Maybach Music Group mixtape

Gentle readers, and especially gentle listeners, you’d better brace yourself for this one. Batten down the hatches, put your earthly affairs into order, pour a drink as stiff as David Cameron boogy-ing atop a Notting Hill Carnival float, and make sure there’s plenty of tinned fruit and Bibles in the bomb shelter. ‘Cause this ain’t gonna be pretty. Look at the cover of Bogota Rich: The Prequel – the title, spelled out in Photoshopped cocaine and gold – and you can probably make a pretty good guess as to what you’re in for here: cocaine (check), endless cash-flashing (cha-ching) and endless gun-toting (cha-chick!).

This is a mixtape which, like Gunplay himself (dread-locked, wild-eyed, tattooed all over his wiry, permanently shirt-defying torso), wears its powder-palpitating heart on its sleeve. There’s nothing very obviously subtle about Gunplay, who is a self-described “human L.A. Riot”. He raps in a manner that demands to be transcribed with the caps-lock soldered down. And he raps – mostly – about extremely explicit, extremely violent, extremely ig’nant ass shit. “Low-Life my whole LIFE!” he unashamedly (proudly, in fact) proclaims on ‘Low Life’.

Gunplay’s lyrics, because of Gunplay’s voice and nuclear delivery system, have a tendency to sound like righteous proclamations, even when consisting of the most unrighteous sentiments imaginable. There is the full retinue of stock gangsta rap concerns in attendance here: materialistic greed, casual sexism, extreme violence, mega-tonz of gunz, and enough surplus testosterone to saturate a thousand jock-straps. So far, so standard-issue – but wait! You can’t judge this mixtape, or Gunplay, by its cover. His raison d’etre may be, by gangsta rap standards, very much average, but Gunplay is no average rapper, and Bogota Rich: The Prequel is no average mixtape. It is, in fact, the leanest, meanest street-rap mixtape released so far this year. For fans of Gunplay this will not be unexpected. For some hip-hop devotees, this might be unthinkable. But he is edging – make that charging – closer to credibility. Non-devotees of Gunplay are perhaps most likely to know of him from his barn-napalming appearance on progressive-rap darling Kendrick Lamar’s seven minute space-odyssey meets trap-ology epic ‘Cartoon & Cereal’ from earlier this year. On that track, Gunplay’s customary boiling point anger blew Lamar’s intricate mumbling off the map, and what’s more, it was powered lyricism that was atypically thoughtful, righteously passionate and openly cathartic in its venting of pain.

This fiery, serious side to Gunplay has been heard before, on tracks like ‘Straight Up Menace’ and ‘All On You’ (which, nonetheless, contained the very funny line “Look at that Phantom, look at that Jag! Illuminati ain’t lookin’ so bad!”), tracks that are useful for inducting the sceptical into the Church of Gunplay: they are relatively moderate examples of a talent that lurches heavily towards the extreme, showing off Gunplay’s technical polish and muscular mic presence without repulsing self-styled sophisticates with topical (and instrumental) barbarity. The one track on Bogota Rich that fits into this less riotous mode is the stunning, brutal ‘Fuck Shit In My Life’. A moody, tensely pregnant orchestral thrum accompanies a blistering verse and hook which incorporates imperious arrogance (“I’m a muthafuckin’ slaughter, I’m being modest / My bitch a goddess, I’m riding through the ghetto and I’m worth a million dollars”) with self-slander (“Just another petty thief / Never had a spaghetti feast”) and disgust at the world of “bottom feeders… snakes and centipedes” without a break for breath.

The rest of the mixtape, which consists of about 50% original tracks, 50% freestyles over popular beats, veers more closely towards the jubilantly OTT frenzy of lead single ‘Jump Out’. This one is quintessential Gunplay: rapping which hurtles along like a Ferrari driven by a severely sozzled Tony Montana, over fire-hydrants and curb-sides and through scattering crowds of hysterical pedestrians (those screams, alongside sirens and gun-shots, act as rhythmic punched-in accompaniments to the rapping). The track, a steroid-fattened pitbull, is not so much killed as clamped between Gunplay’s grinning jaws and shaken until Bolognese sauce. Most of Bogota Rich is like this, if less relentlessly frenzied, and is great. This is what Gunplay does best, and he really does do it best. Few rappers loom as large in the eye of the storm as Gunplay.

The thing is, it is tempting – too tempting – to hear ‘Jump Out’ and the rest of Gunplay’s music as the sound and product of uncontrolled mania: egomaniacal coke rap which is bug-eyed high on its own supply. Gunplay certainly has an image problem in this respect – the swastika tattoo, the infamous video of him snorting coke in Colombia. In his music, too, he dwells in a world of “naked models [and] broken bottles”. But, whatever he’s like as a person, out-of-control is certainly not what he’s like as a rapper. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Bogota Rich is a Dat Piff mixtape, and is therefore prone to some repetitions and redundancies (DJ Holiday’s vocal contribution as tediously superfluous as a drum solo being played over an air-strike – seek out the No DJ version, folks), but really it is the shortest, sharpest mixtape you could hope for. Only 13 tracks long, with minimal skits and guest appearances (Gunplay’s talented-but less-talented-than-Gunplay crew Triple C’s only), and no filler tracks whatsoever. This can hardly be the work of a coked up, self-indulgent maniac. But then, listen to any of Gunplay’s tunes, even the loudest and GBH-iest, and you’ll find evidence of one of the most impeccably controlled rappers currently shouting, with an uncultivated image that’s actually carefully cultivated, and extremely self-aware, with Gunplay’s tongue often closer to his cheek than you might initially expect.

Even so, for the most part, Bogota Rich is fairly shallow stuff. Is this unfortunate? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way, when it comes to putting on a show, and to being thrillingly entertaining, Gunplay definitely doesn’t play. His lyrics are vivid and precise (often in a throwaway way: “Street’s so great / sky stone-grey”, for example). His boasts are unconventional and unforgettable: he is “human methadone”, as “skinny as pasta” (“with a big ol’ Mossberg”). He carries “double Desert Eagles – that’s illegal two times!” As for the way he raps the lyrics – there’s no better example of Gunplay’s masterful mic control than his breath control. The polish, variety, velocity and tightness of his flow is undeniable. Every word is as packed as tightly and precisely as bullets in a clip, and sounds as piercingly and bracingly upon release.

“So much I wanna say, only got one pair of lungs”, Gunplay raps at one point on Bogota Rich. Well, whatever you make of what he says, you’ve really got to hand it to his lungs. Another line that perhaps comes closer to the essence of Gunplay’s Tyson-esque talent: “I beat up the beat, never let it breathe!”. There are plenty of rappers who are nicer people than Gunplay, more edifying and politically conscious, more verbally dexterous – but us Gunplay fans all know who’s wearing the black shorts. Ear lobe in mouth, tattoo on face, opponents being given mouth-to-mouth in the opposite corner: love him or loathe him, the champ is here.

Jack Law