Kid Allure is easy-going but anti-bullshit, his less prone to brag about his own realness than he is to deride a status quo that doesn’t seem to require it of rappers. On his freestyle, “Ochie Wally” he doesn’t petition for authenticity either, instead he grounds tales of his young, wild and free lifestyle in a see-it-for-yourself-details.
In that sense, he doesn’t deal in Hollywood-ready drug or gang tropes, instead favoring the small-time and far grittier intimacy of his own neighborhood worldview. He observes from a close enough distance to feel the heat and apparently unwilling to step back himself. This body of work rests on a nostalgic axis between a no drugs, no lean, no auto tune era, where skill and effort was emphasized with earnest wordplay.
Hailing from Brooklyn, Kid Allure’s use of menacing lyrics isn’t new territory for him, and it succeeds because he has a very distinct and uncompromising vision of what it means to be lethal. As deceptively simple as these lines are on “Ochie Wally”, in his typically oblique manner, Kid Allure is actually making quite a mission statement.
This kind of fatalism is not new to rap, but where many rappers have superficially used it to justify excessive celebration—“champagne for the pain”—Kid Allure uses it to justify his own reality and attach it to personal life hurdles. On “Ochie Wally” the rapper is immune to cheery street rap and he knows there’s a way to do it where it’s listenable and likable, but it shouldn’t just be some happy stuff.
There’s a deadpan matter-of-factness to Kid Allure’s delivery that replaces the glorification of the fast life with the grimness of the circumstance that he justifies it with. He never wastes a word in exhibiting a hustler’s hard-won resilience, and he’s abetted by a ’90s-inspired Nas beat that buoy’s his story without overwhelming it.
