Rap Blog: Boldy James and Tee Grizzley skip stony syllables across a wavy Harry Fraud beat

Rap Blog is a weekly showcase of a standout rap song.

If you ask Harry Fraud why his beats sound so wavy, he might point to the stars. “The Aquarius inside me, it just puts me in a water vibe” he told an interviewer back in 2017, saying he loves to build beats around goosebump-inducing loops, even if these ambient textures and chord progressions aren’t always “the most high energy thing.” Boldy James views his music through a similarly low-octane, aqueous lens: “Even though I got the mildest, mellow, laid-back delivery, my flow is like water... I kick it how I live it,” the Griselda rapper told Passion of the Weiss in 2022.

Their new joint single “CECIL FIELDER” bobs along like a rubber duck adrift in the ocean, as unhurried as a slugger circling the bases after a home run. Boldy’s laced vignettes meander around the hardships of street life, proficient enough in powder deals to avoid petty struggles, but nowhere near the kingpin wealth raps of a Rick Ross or JAY-Z. “Last grade completed was the eighth, but now it's cakes and all / Always been misunderstood, but I was good at breaking laws,” he sighs.

Fellow Detroiter Tee Grizzley typically comes across a touch less poetic than Boldy, and here his direct verse cuts through the hazy Harry Fraud instrumental with gritty immediacy: “Twelfth birthday, my pops gave me a stack and that shit smelt like crack / Before God gave me all these dreams to rap, I dreamed of scorpion stamps.” His plain-spoken bars are deceptively syncopated, irregularly swelling and receding, like when Tee raps, “it’s distribution, can’t say we using, the bag we got too heavy.” “CECIL FIELDER” runs just two and a half minutes, but the way Tee Grizzley and Boldy James skip syllables across the beat could stick in your head for hours.