Off first listen of Dead Locs pt. 2 by Blueface, I didn’t know how to feel. I laughed hysterically, and when I laugh at music, it’s never because I think it’s that funny. It’s just that good. The instrumental on this ode to fallen Crips across the globe thumped mercilessly out of the stock speakers of my ‘07 Cadillac SRT, forcing me to bob my head uncontrollably. Soon after the beat hit me with a right hook, the former college quarterback known as Blueface Bleed Em’ sent me to Pluto with a legendary haymaker. “I had to wake that bitch up, she was sleep on me, yeah aight, look at me now, li’l baby, on the dead locs!!” Like are you serious? That’s how you wanna start this shit off? Let’s fucking gooooo!! As the California native (grew up in Los Angeles, the IE and the Bay Area) continued his fast-paced-off-beat cadence, you could feel the spirit of the hyphy movement flowing through his veins. As a guy who grew up listening to Bay Area legends like Keak Da Sneak, E-40, Messy Marv, Mac Dre etc, the rush from past memories of Ghost Riding at stop lights as a yute gave me life. Blueface may be off beat, but what difference does it make? He’s not the first rapper to disregard the beat and use his words to create another instrumental that happens to complement the original. Suga Free did it, when Juelz had teeth he made beautiful music doing it, and G-Herbo does it now. With that being said, nobody sounds like this Courage-the-Cowardly-dog-ass rapper. After replaying Dead Locs pt. 2 about 15 times, I then went through his mixtapes, Famous Cryp and Too Coccy, jamming the original version of Dead Locs, Respect My Cryppin; Put it in Her Face, Next Big Thing (insanely hard), Movie Scenes and Freak Bitch. From there, I became a stan. I’m not lying, my standom is to the point where I told 4MPHYAli that we’d be seeing Blueface on a Sprite Commercial featuring LeBron and then went on a rant on how he’d get a Drake feature (he secured that). Recently, he dropped Studio, which is about his process and come up -- the hook is crazy -- ended 2018 with “Beat It,” where he sticks on beat in the first verse, throws in a hook that’ll have you bouncing and then goes off beat on the second verse and also shot a video for the remix to Thotiana with YG. Not only is he original, Blueface possesses a catalog full of quick-witted prophetic bars that would make Aristotle tear up, garnered cosigns from West Coast titans like Kendrick Lamar and Ice Cube, who said, “I definitely know this dude can rap,” and flaunts a social media presence that would make Soulja Boy proud — and he is, just listen to his Breakfast Club interview. He may not be everyone’s glass of Jameson, but who cares? Blueface Mahomes definitely has the content to back up his originality and the marketing savvy to get that content in front of the right audiences. Anybody who’s willing to drive around to random high schools, hop on his car with a mic and perform for a crowd of kids for free, deserves everything coming to them. Yeaaaa aight, Corbin Blueface knows what he’s doing. The Famous Cryp is here to stay.