Last week, we wrapped up with an inexplicably weird Caev joint out of Boston. It led me to a long weekend of catching up on a lot of Beantown artists, old and new. When I was a budding rap mogul in my 20’s, I had everyone’s baseball card stats memorized. As I get older, it grows harder to sustain situational awareness. Coffee helps.
Cousin Stizz was omnipresent enough to be engraved in my memory still. He was such an improbable breakout story: a Boston rapper who made distinctly Boston trap songs that blew up both locally and online. It was never as loud or brash as the ATL formula, his ear for beats was more LA, always spacious, laid back. I didn’t find out until years later that his overnight success was shaped by good old Michael Christmas. The more you dig into any city scene, the more you realize it’s all just one long story.
At the time he was blowing up, the hype seemed out of proportion to his music. His momentum was regional and so was his music. Boston loves Cousin Stizz and always will, but past that, there was a hard ceiling on his career growth. He famously does not care. Sure enough, getting signed to RCA led inexorably back to being dropped by RCA, and now Stizz is (quite comfortably) independent, and doing it with more or less the exact same team that got him there.
That’s a beautiful thing, and I have nothing but respect for his career even if the actual music never moved me much. I’ve also never heard the man drop a wack joint yet. That kind of consistency wins wars in any fashion cycle. The refinement of his pen game has mostly been a matter of subtraction; the words & beats he omits have shaped a more precise flow. His bars, now and forever, remain straightforward stuff, competently done Everyman Rap.
Yet the Cousin Stizz story is definitely bigger than Boston. He toured, he tours, and verily, he shall tour again. He loves to rap and he puts in good, hard work doing it. With the connections & team that he has, he stands one great album away from breaking into the upper echelons of both the industry and culture of rap music. Whether or not that album gets made is between him and God.
In terms of “Field Goal” itself, once again, it is the excellence of execution that distinguishes both the song and the video here. This was a major production with a big team, and it goes from cliches to surprises very quickly. Along the way, there are an abundance of cinematic & arresting shots.
This a worthy single. You can hear all the time he spends in the booth hammering out nuances, and the beat itself is immense. The hook is superb, lean but bezel cut. Props to long career, earned. Four Dickies.
