Then he confides that he declined the re-up because he could sense the walls closing in. From the album’s closer, “You Don’t Know the Half”: “I was trapped out with my phone jumping, then I cashed out, told ’em ‘Don’t front me’/I was searching for an early exit, tryna back out ’cause I know they’re coming.” The way he raps the first bar, his nerves seem still. Yet Lito’s greatest gift as a writer is not his ability to reveal himself through confession, but to condense everything-confession, threat, fear, sneer-into short, clear, stylish couplets. Where some confessional rap reads as manic or leaves the listener feeling like a voyeur, Lito has a unique ability to drop jarring personal details in a way that seems to reassure and calm his audience. The strongest vocal performance here is on a song called “Crying in the Car,” where Lito raps, as deliberately as if he were on a therapist’s couch, about starting to play basketball again to block out the weapons that cloud his mind’s eye, about quitting prescription drugs, about the pick-up game allowing him to sweat the alcohol out of his system. But there are telling contrasts: Today, Lito leans deeper into his voice, which can turn low and guttural to the point of vocal fry when he’s at at his most exhausted. WAR is nominally the sequel to a mixtape from 2011 and it is, predictably, contemplative and punishing in mostly equal measure. His latest album, At WAR With Myself Too, is similarly unsparing. His writing is tinged by paranoia-founded fears, like cars parked out front of his house for hours on end or sordid, unglamorous affairs coming to light. Lito can be a very funny, very sarcastic writer, but on his solo work-there’s tons, nearly all of it worth at least a cursory listen-he often burrows as deep as possible into the dark corners of his mind. Those Step Brothers records have grim crime tales and sober screeds about American racism, but they’re buoyed by the levity (and joy) that Lito and Trip evidently feel when rapping together. His three collaborations with fellow Tennessean Don Trip-a Memphis native who was also briefly crushed by the major-label wringer-as the Step Brothers made him a critical darling. But in his defense, he’s rarely even tried for that sort of fame: Shute’s music under the Starlito name is dense and prickly, and it leans far away from pop. In the decade since the Times story, he’s put out more than two dozen releases without ever reaching the commercial heights a marquee spot on mid-aughts Cash Money seemed to offer. Before long, All $tar, born Jermaine Shute, retreated into the underground and into his own head.

New yo gotti mixtape 2011