Released on September 11, 2015.
We certainly got our fill of Conway, Westside Gunn and Benny the Butcher around 2020. We saw no shortage of Hitler Wears Hermes and Tana Talk releases either. And yet, Griselda Records’ true year was 2015. That was when, operating out of Buffalo, they won over old-school heads and a new generation of New York rap fans alike by popularizing a formula Roc Marciano had brought back up to date five years earlier. This was the era of Reject 2. And it was also the era of Griselda Ghost, a straightforward EP by Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine (later expanded with remixes or instrumentals of three tracks), and the project that, for many, started it all.
Griselda Ghost. The Griselda in the title is Griselda Blanco, whose name the collective – and future label – had adopted. And the Ghost is Big Ghost Ltd. Here, the man best known as a blogger proves himself to be an outstanding producer. He learned every lesson from his 1990s New York forebears: their heavy tempos, their gift for beautiful samples – from Gladys Knight to Ennio Morricone – dug out of 1970s music. The piano on “Brains On The Basquiat,” the ethereal voices on “Fendi Seats,” the electric guitar on “Empire,” the strings on “If I Ruled The World ’15”: each creates moments of striking intensity.
As for half-brothers Westside Gunn and Conway, they make the most of their contrasting voices in these chronicles of street life, violence and crime, peppering them with the customary references to Scarface (“Rahbannga”), The Wire (“Dutch Master”), and an entire universe populated by drug dealers (Freeway Ricky Ross, Richard Porter), basketball and American football players, and clothing brands. It is the full imagery of the East Coast urban jungle, albeit one influenced by trap music, with its ad-libs and tales of cooking up.
Here, it is still boom bap rather than the drumless style. The past is a ghost, but one that remains very much present: from the Freeway Ricky Ross quote that opens the record with a lesson in Reaganomics, to the Basquiat reference two tracks later, not to mention this 2015 take on Nas and Lauryn Hill’s “If I Ruled The World,” itself invoking Havoc and Prodigy. This release is Griselda Records’ manifesto. It is also one of the label’s most unabashedly revivalist statements.
