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Even someone who had never heard that voice could scan Papo’s release names (sample title: Pap on P.E.Ds) and clock him as a massive sports fan. A former basketball obsessive who was born on the same day as Barry Bonds — “Bro, he was too crazy,” he says of the embattled seven-time NL MVP, “even when he was skinny Bonds” — Papo dots his raps with references to athletes who were (or were becoming) stars right around that 2004 sweet spot. And yet, as is the case with his music, he doesn’t cling to nostalgia for any one era: he argues that the NBA, with its increased parity and wider distribution of superstars, is better now than it has been in some time.
To that point, when I ask Papo if he could pick any rapper in any given year to trade verses with on a song, he reaches back not to the W. Bush years, but much further. “Oh, Slick Rick” he says. “Slick Rick in ‘88 — ‘Mona Lisa’ Slick Rick. That’s the Super Saiyan rapper.” Though this seems, at first, discordant with his major influences, it’s easy on closer examination to see why Papo would feel a kinship to the Ruler, an MC positively dripping in style and seemingly impervious to the trends of the moment. When you strip away the signifiers of one period, the detritus of another, you’re left with a single, enduring truth: being nice is forever. In the same way that PUMA Classics, for example, can be styled with any look, the calling cards of past styles can be repurposed to new ends in the studio. For as rooted as his music is in the culture of the early 2000s and the grainy digital dystopia of the early 2010s, it’s also a style that stakes itself on execution — on being sharper, hungrier, more colorful than the next artist. In Papo2oo4’s music, there is refuge in the past, but there’s no place to hide.
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Jarastyle – #FOREVER.CLASSIC #Papo2oo4 #sweet #spot
Courtesy : https://www.thefader.com/2023/05/05/foreverclassic-papo2oo4-has-found-the-sweet-spot