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Fashawn VibeZ

Twelve tracks from a Fresno rapper whose debut album was good enough that people started comparing him to Nas within a week of its release.

Fashawn

Fashawn came out of Fresno — not Los Angeles, not the Bay Area, but California's agricultural interior, which has almost no rap infrastructure and a great deal of the poverty that produces good writers. His 2009 debut Boy Meets World, produced entirely by Exile, arrived with no major-label push and immediately established him as one of the best pure lyricists of his generation.

The comparison people reached for was Nas's Illmatic, and it was not lazy: a young rapper, one producer, ten tracks, a specific neighbourhood rendered in close detail. Nas later signed him to Mass Appeal, which was a reasonable response to the comparison.

What has kept his profile modest is temperament rather than talent. He writes densely, releases slowly, and has never made a record designed to be a hit.

What to listen for

"Stars" opens the set and is the best introduction to how he builds a verse — long, unhurried, with the payoff held back.

"Mother Amerikkka" is the political record and the angriest thing here, and "Strange Fruit Remix" with Common and John Legend puts him in serious company without diminishing him.

"California" is the one that makes the case for Fresno rather than the coast, and it is a considerably more complicated picture of the state than the genre usually offers.

"Relaxation" with J. Cole and Omen is the collaboration most people find first.

"Clouds Above" and "Afraid" are the introspective pair and the best writing on the list, and "Guess Who's Back" is the most purely enjoyable.

"Give You All I Got" closes things and is the warmest thing he has recorded.

Go deeper

Boy Meets World (2009) is the album, and it should be heard in sequence with Exile's production intact. The Ecology (2015) is the Mass Appeal follow-up.

Exile's other work — particularly with Blu on Below the Heavens — is essential, and that record is the other great one-rapper-one-producer album of the same period.

Listening note: he writes long. Most of these verses run well past the point where a contemporary rapper would hand over to a hook, and the payoff is usually in the last two bars rather than the first. Give the tracks room and the structure reveals itself; skip through them and it sounds merely dense.

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