I have watched Style Wars well over 500 times. Every moment that Kase 2 was on camera, he laid down a dozen timeless turns of phrase, easy. However, “if I really get into it and start camouflaging it, I don’t think you would even be able to read it” is the passage we turn to today. This is the cold, hard horizon of legibility that rappers cross at the cost of their legends, legacies and liquid assets. You can’t get too deep.
Many of them meant to do it, of course, a deliberate middle finger to mass culture and mass audiences. Word to Chino XL. One of the best live sets I’ve seen from anyone, in any genre, was watching Elzhi at Nectars. Even including staff, there were less than 20 people in the venue. Word to REKS. Finale is like the Vakill of Detroit; an obsessive, uncompromising hip hop head who has built a rep for going way too hard with his pen game. Word to Fred the Godson. Like so many other old school fossils, he’s making a comeback in 2026. If you’re familiar with his work, no surprises here: he kills it. Word to Supastition.
I cannot account how for how in the fuck Apollo Brown has sustained his run over the past decade plus. Critiques that he is formulaic are fair game, but his ratio of hits to misses is a world class outlier. He is destined for the top of the pantheon. He does everything that many producers have done before him, sure, but if he ever fumbled the recipe, that evidence is buried somewhere remote.
The video is high definition but oddly goofy & crude. I am assuming this was made by a (young) family member. I can dig it because that same awkwardness emphasizes how much Finale’s disposition matches his bars. There is almost zero artifice between artist and art here. He is tightly wound, polymath referential, and his work with recursion is the calculus version of what 2 Chainz is doing with a sixteen. He does all that with the same detatched cool that Clint Eastwood brought to playing cowboys in Spain.
It does seem like that intensity has been tempered by time. We’ll have to reserve judgment until the album drops, but at least on “Wishin,” Finale sounds notably relaxed. As ever, the unconventional pockets he bends his bars into can sound like simple contempt for meter at first. Every verse unfolds. It’s up to us to catch the logic.
Some Pitchfork twerp actually complained that he was too good, can you believe that shit? “Too many memorable lines,” something I still chuckle about over a decade later. Music journalism deserved to die and I do not mourn this long, slow passing much.
As a single, “Wishin” is some perfectly pitched, true school Detroit shit. The beats and rhymes are on point; the video needed to be far better to match that. This independent hustle is a perpetual learning curve but the bar is set unforgivingly high in 2026. Four Dickies.
