Shiesty Season

The most accurate distillation of Pooh Shiesty’s mission on debut mixtape <i>Shiesty Season</i> comes from one of the project’s guests. “I don’t wanna rap about nothing but gunplay,” 21 Savage deadpans on “Box of Churches”. Savage appears on the tape alongside fellow street-rap heavyweights Gucci Mane and Lil Durk, as well as a handful of lesser-known MCs like BIG30, Choppa Wop and Lil Hank. If they have a single thing in common, it’s an affinity for high-powered weaponry. But it is Pooh Shiesty, of course, who set the tone.<br /> Across <i>Shiesty Season</i>’s 17 tracks, the MC consistently details, in that readily identifiable Memphis drawl, the importance of guns in his life on songs like “Back in Blood”, “50 Shots”, “Take a Life” and “Choppa Way”. Deviations from the theme are few and far between, even on songs like the one named for pioneering musical entrepreneur and Dirty South hip-hop legend Master P (“One shot to the head, may he rest in peace/I’m the reason doctors hooked him up, I feel like Master P”). And lest you think a song called “Twerksum” was an attempt at appeasing the fairer sex, Shiesty is simply offering fair warning that the “choppa get to shaking like it twerk or something”.