Shiesty Season

The most accurate distillation of Pooh Shiesty’s mission on debut mixtape Shiesty Season comes from one of the project’s guests. “I don’t wanna rap about nothing but gunplay,” 21 Savage deadpans on “Box of Churches.” Savage appears on the tape alongside fellow street-rap heavyweights Gucci Mane and Lil Durk, as well as a handful of lesser-known MCs like BIG30, Choppa Wop, and Lil Hank. If they have a single thing in common, it’s an affinity for high-powered weaponry. But it is Pooh Shiesty, of course, who set the tone.

Across Shiesty Season’s 17 tracks, the MC consistently details, in that readily identifiable Memphis drawl, the importance of guns in his life on songs like “Back in Blood,” “50 Shots,” “Take a Life,” and “Choppa Way.” Deviations from the theme are few and far between, even on songs like the one named for pioneering musical entrepreneur and Dirty South hip-hop legend Master P (“One shot to the head, may he rest in peace/I’m the reason doctors hooked him up, I feel like Master P”). And lest you think a song called “Twerksum” was an attempt at appeasing the fairer sex, Shiesty is simply offering fair warning that the “choppa get to shaking like it twerk or something.”