One of Tacoma’s many nicknames is Grit City, a moniker pertaining to its blue-collar and hardnosed population. However, if you were to look at the city’s history of Hip Hop, most of any kind of gritty or grimy sound in that arena would be attributed almost entirely to West Coast influences. This is fitting considering Tacoma sits on top of the Best Left Coast, but there are still MC’s out there who feed on that raw, dusty sound. J. Esco, a New York native living in Tacoma now, embodies that type both as a mic controller and producer alike. His latest project Crown Me attests to that.
Crown Me takes a look at just about everything contemporary in rap and throws up a big fat middle finger to it. Autotune? Fuck off. Trap beats? Fuck off. Soft shit? The fuck out of here. On the production side, what you will find in Esco is a penchant to put together well-crafted beat breaks that are reminiscent of the grimy New York vibes in its heyday.
