This July during Rick Ross’ Be Out Day in his old neighborhood of Carol City, ten to twelve dozen gunshots were launched into the air in the middle of the annual charity event. The crowd panicked and the cops arrived before headliners Ross and Flo Rida could even take the stage. But before shit got shut down, rapper Brisco grabbed the mic as the DJ dropped the first ten seconds of his furious single “Bitch I’m Me,” pulled it back up, then dropped it again. Brisco’s decision to take the stage when no one else would added one more feat to his already growing mythology. “Bitch I’m Me,” with its turbocrunk beat and refusal to apologize for anything, has become an anthem across South Florida. Now Cash Money Records is banking on it to transition into a global hood phenomenon—as Ross’ “Hustlin” did two years ago—signing Brisco and now readying the release of his debut, Street Medicine.
Brisco is part of the tradition of MCs who rhyme like they haven’t eaten a decent meal in weeks. His mic form is pure swagger and he wields a controlled rage as he spits, I’m the newest in charge, like Raul Castro. Though currently still on the underside of fame, every artist affiliated with the new Miami sound machine is pointing to him as the region’s next rapper to blow up. In the past fifteen months he’s appeared on albums from Ross, Flo Rida, DJ Khaled, and Baby. Even Miami’s relocated king Lil Wayne regularly spars with him in the studio and has even taken to calling him his twin, though Brisco’s structured style is more compliment than mirror to Wayne’s pharmaceutical free associations. “People who don’t know me from a can of paint can feel my music,” says Brisco. “When you heard that Jeezy for the first time, it was, like, special. When you heard Ross for the first time, it was, like, special. And can’t nobody deny they hear that in my music.”
Brisco grew up in Opa-Locka, a section of Miami-Dade County where Haitian influences mix with southern traditions. Brisco says he gets the snap and aggression in his flow from Opa-Locka, but his upbringing there also made him part of another tradition, the one of survivors devoted to chronicling their life truths. He lost both of his parents and a brother, and he says those deaths made him into the MC that he is now. “My mom died when I was nine years old and I always used to write poems about her,” he says. “Writing has always been important to me. Even my handwriting is good.”