Rome Streetz has been all fire since he showed up. A natural born spitter with a voice that could cut glass, there are no weak links in his catalog. The Noise Kandy series alone would be enough to cement his stature as a top talent, and that’s not even half of his discography. In 2021, he put out four flawless albums and then followed up the next year with Kiss The Ring, one of the single best rap LPs of the decade so far. It also stands as Westside Gunn’s finest moment yet as “curator” for someone else’s record. (Let the record show those Armani Caesar joints are slept on, though.)
Speaking of “slept on,” much of the discourse around Rome Streetz paints him as an underground underdog. In reality, he is an established success story who has already reached most of his potential audience. There simply will never be as much demand for top shelf product as there is for Diet Coke. How you interpret this reality is a matter of your disposition. Personally, I find it inspiring that his kind of niche excellence can still keep a man paid, fed & touring Europe at regular intervals. It’s still mighty comfortable at the top.
We live in an age of revelations. In the long, lurching hangover of a music industry coming to grips with the end of free money, that retreating tide is going to reveal a lot of dumb lies. The corporate cartel that has been creating stars by fiat and subsidizing shit product with tax-deductible losses is slowly realizing they’re on the same footing as the indies now: they need to make some real fucking money.
Most of the biggest stars in the label ecosystem are living on leased movie sets & borrowed time. They didn’t do the work and they didn’t earn their spots. Meanwhile, made men like Roc Marciano, Alchemist or Mach-Hommy are out here living their art every day. The sheer scale of the media noise machine skews public perceptions of fame & success, but the real money is mostly independent.
All these XXL Freshmen type rappers are six figures in debt and the poor fools can’t even cook themselves a decent meal. Society has failed them. So have their managers.
Rome Streetz is eating good on at least two continents any given year. Grime has yet to successfully cross the Atlantic. For all the money, time & ink that got expended trying to break Dizzee Rascal stateside, he’s still a nobody in the land of the free. That means that Grime has been somewhere between a secret weapon and a free lunch for rap plagiarists in America, from the underground to the industry. Rome Streetz came by his influences far more honestly, going to high school in London while he came into his own style as a rapper. For all the Big L comparisons he gets, D Double E was just as much of a prototype for Rome’s slicing staccato.
Influences are just God rolling dice, accidents of history & geography. Rap was shaped by hundreds of regional scenes but the artform itself remains squarely New York City. “Procall” is pure Queens, lyrical fitness and casual menace laid over some crushing Evidence filth. It’s raw adrenaline, but it’s also not his best work. Like Conway, his sheer output, both as a solo act & as a guest feature, has gradually revealed the seams in his pen game. Yet to his credit, Rome Streetz has never phoned it in as much as Conway often does. Even on his off days, he remains untouchable in the booth. Four Dickies.
