Detroit and the Bay Area are two rap meccas that are forever intertwined. Some theorize the bond goes back to the early days of the Great Migration when a few automobile plants moved from Detroit to Oakland; others claim the ties were built through generations of hustling. Payroll Giovanni, a modern-day icon of Detroit rap, considered the synchronicity to have fully bloomed in hip-hop when influential local crew the Street Lord’z were collaborating with Bay Area stars like E-40, Spice 1, and Too $hort in the late ’90s and early 2000s. For his part, Too $hort said, “Detroit, it’s like Oakland/It’s a Black thing and I’m a Black man.” (Hey, sometimes it’s really that simple.) If Too $hort’s Detroit shoutout was the proposal, then the Street Lord’z 1999 cross-pollinated debut mixtape was the wedding day.
That’s all to explain why Detroit’s J.U.S and Oakland’s Squadda B sound as if they share the same brain right out the gate on their first joint album, 3rd Shift. On the mic is J.U.S, a longtime engineer and producer with Bruiser Brigade, the Danny Brown-led crew of elder-millennial shit-talkers. In the last few years, he’s turned his attention to slick-tongued, autobiographical rhymes. Behind the boards is Squadda, formerly one-half of rap duo Main Attrakionz, who dropped one of the great mixtapes of the early 2010s with 808s & Dark Grapes II.
Together on 3rd Shift they’re a loose-lipped, hi-hat-happy riot. J.U.S’s storytelling is personal and funny as hell: a lifetime of balancing Detroit player status and more ordinary responsibilities has him worn down. “I’m on the road doin’ shows I don’t miss my bitch/She be hatin’, say I’m old, I should fuckin’ quit,” he raps on “Da Best Out,” sounding as weathered as Lethal Weapon’s Roger Murtaugh. Squadda underlines the mood with a stringy beat that could appear in a spaghetti western, a genre full of aging gunslingers clinging to their dreams. Squadda’s instrumentals are miraculously suffocating and untrendy: He sounds like he’s been disconnected from the internet for half a decade, which makes the beats feel fresh and unpredictable.
No surprise with Bruiser Brigade: The clique has created a world rooted in regional scenes—Detroit, specifically—while working at their own unconcerned pace. J.U.S pulls that off on 3rd Shift, leaning into the hallmarks of his rapping-ass city: Sticky one-liners and imagery that is so outlandish that it has to be rooted in some sort of truth. I could imagine his Cash Money bars on “Nascar” fitting in with the luxurious flexes of Peezy and Babyface Ray; I could hear his smoothly rapped verse on “We Outside”—with mentions of his chicken wing order and gator shoes—on a posse cut with the sharp-witted punchline kings of Flint. The shift is from Detroit hustler talking like a small-time kingpin to Detroit hustler sounding stressed out in the need of a vacation, raps where you can tell has lived a hundred lives and has multiple stories to tell about each one. On “Cheese Cheese Cheese,” his experience casts a gloomier mood as his struggles and insecurities pile up. On “6K” he approaches the neverending grind with a relentless sense of humor: “I got mortgage, I got habits, I got freaks I owe a few.” Everyday headaches are still the greatest source of hip-hop comedy.
