Boogie is fed up. Leading off his debut album with the single ‘Soho,’ Boogie lays into people who invite him out for 30 minute dinner meetings that take an hour to get to (LA traffic if you’ve never experienced it, is one of the 8th wonders of the world but not in a good way). Coming in on the hook Boogie raps, “please no more meetings at Soho, please no more thinking we bro bros, I ain’t been seen in like oh, no, I ain’t been seen in like oh,” referring to South Hollywood.
‘Soho’ serves as an airing of grievances and public service announcement for Boogie. He’s moving low-key, doing his thing and he’s not here for forced and fake friendships. Content wise the song reminds me a lot of Kanye’s ‘No More Parties in LA’ and a little bit of DJ Khaled’s ‘No New Friends.’
For the second verse Boogie taps Dreamville’s JID who brings out his own list of grievances detailing that he ain’t meeting you for dinner, he ain’t your friend and if you don’t watch it, he’s gonna snap this year. Boogie and JID are both young greats in the making, rappers who are still lyrical and technical in an era of declining vocabularies and questionable flows and the pairing works especially well over James Teej’s simple and effective production, featuring a sparse drum/percussion arrangement, and some lo-fi vocal samples in the background before an abrupt beat switch for the outro moves to a brooding rhodes and bass arrangement where Boogie broods about dead and locked up friends; “I seen my bros get turned to corpse, I’m forced to see em using force and they’re still free in court,” as well as the age old subject of relationship problems and fake friends refusing to back him up and stand up for him.
Overall ‘Soho’ is an excellent lead off for Boogie and his debut album Everything’s for Sale (available now on Shady/Interscope) is a bright re-introduction to Boogie as a rapper and definitely worth a listen.
Words by Barz.
