I first heard Flee Lord in 2019, opening up for the full Griselda lineup when The Almighty Tour came through the Middle East. Opening is a tough gig anywhere, but especially in Boston. It’s just an inherently antagonistic crowd. Plus, the older heads are still angry about decades of drug dealers and rich kids, almost all of them wack, buying their way onto an otherwise decent & necessary rap show. During those years, openers had to be actively avoided; arrivals to the venue had to be carefully timed.
At worst, Flee Lord faced some indifference, at least by the bar and the merch tables, but he had the bulk of the crowd eating out of his hand. Dude had them hooked. They were here for that gritty street shit rendered at a high level of technical skill, and that happens to be exactly what Flee Lord has always been selling.
Speaking of selling, I wonder how much merch he moved that night, if any. Saying that Flee Lord operates in the shadow of Griselda is unfair. The entire landscape where rap, drugs and fashion overlap is currently operating in that shadow. Even with the crew essentially defunct via schism now, their sheer impact is still working though the culture.
Curious, though, how so many features in that legendary Griselda catalog never blew up much as a result. In the case of Flee Lord, I believe his very authenticity is what holds him back from bigger success. He never expands his world beyond war stories, brick boasts, death threats, and gang jokes because that is his entire life, then as now. Like Baldacci over in LA, this is not an individual rapper so much as a neighborhood set, speaking through a pure vessel.
Besides, what is blowing up even worth? Real fame is both dangerous and hard to monetize sustainably. You don’t need billboards in Times Square to make money off music, and LordMobb is doing just fine. Building a business like that is not easy to do, but all that hard work should not obscure the fact that a remarkable number of independent artists & outfits are doing it, year after year, straight through a decades-long recession in a dying empire with a world on fire. That grit is as American as it gets.
The video is smooth sleight of hand, spinning a couple of takes, locations and b-roll into an official looking final product. Open with a couple drone shots they bought the license to for the price of a ham sandwich and boom, you’re golden. The tools to capture and create this kind of high fidelity spectacle are getting cheaper every year: there is no valid reason for independent rappers to have shit videos in 2026.
This would all be perfectly adequate and average Rap Product if not for Starz Coleman unleashing a killer guest verse in the second half. Just going twice as hard is a classic recipe for stealing the show, but there were a lot of outstanding runs in the mix. He is a technically gifted rapper, but there’s also a wry intellect behind those bars, too.
Here’s a toast to excellence, to hard work done right. Here’s hoping Flee Lord and Starz Coleman have a long, comfortable career selling hood horror stories on limited edition vinyl to suburban computer programmers with incredible hi-fi systems. Here’s hoping Fleemobb can afford to make better videos this time next year. Here and now, “40 SHOTS” is still a rock solid summer single for the hardcore heads. Four Dickies.
