Tana Talk 4

Each installment of Benny the Butcher’s celebrated Tana Talk mixtape series lifted his star just a little bit higher, and the Buffalo-hailing MC went into the release of Tana Talk 4 expecting nothing less. “Tana Talk 1, I took over the hood,” he told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden. “I was on some mixtape, neighborhood…Tana Talk 2, I was still in the hood. I took over the city, though. Tana Talk 3, I took over the underground. Tana Talk 4, I feel like I'm taking over the world, honestly.”

The Butcher’s profile has never been higher (and his jewelry never brighter), as the MC has spent the past half decade helping to build the Griselda Records brand—alongside cohorts Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine—into the industry standard for streetwise lyricism. Tana Talk 4, which fulfills any and all contractual obligations with the Griselda label, sets the table for the MC’s forthcoming Def Jam debut in a way that only the 2022 version of Benny the Butcher could have done. “I've been rapping since I was 16, professionally,” Benny says. “So I had war stories, but I don't got the stories I got now. Who knew I'd be on songs, naming them after my girl, India? Who knew I'd be on songs talking about going through a divorce, talking about a daughter, or saying I got a stepdaughter? Just grown-people shit. That just comes with age. And I feel my listeners make me feel comfortable to talk like that.”

But if there’s anything Benny does, it’s keep it real, and he does that continuously over production provided by Daringer and The Alchemist, comparing himself in one instance to the movie character Scarface, Death Row Records cofounder and cocaine kingpin Harry-O, and Joe Pesci (“Guerrero”); lamenting the time he spent in a wheelchair after being shot (“Bust a Brick Nick”); and then also claiming on the J. Cole collaboration “Johnny P’s Caddy” that he “can never leave the scene without checkin' [his] mirrors visually.” “I got three felonies, I've been to state prison, been to federal prison—this is my life,” Benny says. “My daughter spent her first birthday when I was in the feds. My brother passed away. I'm one of them guys! So the most I could do—or the least I could do—is just, in my music, let them know both sides to this.”