Hunxho :: Not One of Them

I’m not going to take it for granted you know who Hunxho is. If you do feel free to skip ahead one paragraph. For everybody else here’s a brief bio — Ibrahim Muhammad Dodo was born in Greensboro, NC in 1999 but spent most of his growing up on the East side of Atlanta. You can’t find an official bio stating how tall he is, but unofficial ones suggest he hit a hellafied growth spurt in his teens and stands somewhere between 6’7″ and 6’8″ today. He had some ambition of finding success in basketball and even left Atlanta to go to college in Colorado, but it didn’t pan out for him the way rapping did. By 2022 his song “Let’s Get It” was going viral, leading to a remix with 21 Savage and guest appearances of his own for other rappers.

The single “Free Da Press” off his latest release “Not One of Them” surprised me — but not because of the song itself. A laundry list of producers worked on the beat including (but not limited) to 88Krazy, B. March and Kid Wond3r. Adding more people did not make it more distinct, nor did lyrics like “Every opp bitch gotta go, you should’ve nеver tried me.” It’s almost a paint-by-numbers example of Atlantean trap music and it doesn’t help that Hunxho sounds eerily like Future. What DID surprise me was this disclaimer at the beginning of the music video.

“All weapons/drugs used in this video are props designed by prop specialists for cinematic entertainment.”

I’m in favor of this. It might be obvious to a critical thinker that the whips in music videos are rented, the icy chains are replicas or on loan, and that the guns being waved around are “cinematic props.” We live in a time where critical thinking is at an all-time low though, so I have a lot of respect for Hunxho and his team choosing to say the quiet part out loud. That accidentally engineered a little more respect for “Not One of Them” as I listened to it. While I still found he wasn’t doing much to separate himself from his peers lyrically, individual songs like the DB!, DaWizvrd & Money Musik laced “It Get Hot” started to stand out. In a time dominated by artificial sounding tracks the piano and horn samples stood out, and the crooner at the beginning set up the presentation lovely.

“I had took a nigga blick/and ever since then, I been slidin/these niggaz bitch.” When I focus on what Hunxho is saying and not the way he says it (it’s pleasantly melodic) or the beats, it turns into a lot of tropes. He has a lot of opps who are bitches and hoes, and a lot of bitches and hoes he’d like to fuck, and a lot of friends he’s down to ride for. It’s the same machismo and posturing that became so successful that an entire scene has calcified around it. We’re able to issue a disclaimer that the weapons and drugs in a music video aren’t to be believed, but every rap artist from the unknown to moderately successful to world famous is supposed to be 100% telling it like it is at all times.

“I did the time, I did too many crimes
I filled him up, I shot too many rounds” – “Money On Rivals”

Look, who am I to argue? Hunxho may have it like that, or at least have lived it like that in the past, or at the very least been around enough people like it to tell tales about it ripped from real life. It goes back to what I said about “critical thinking” though. If every single trap artist had as many bodies on their name as they do on records, the whole scene would disappear immediately. That’s not just because law enforcement would interpret their raps as confessions (which unfortunately does happen) but because there would be so many people gunned down nobody would be left to make music. It’s even more depressing when the posturing could have been left on record and people take it to a level where they have to prove themselves legit. I’d rather rappers sue each other than shoot at each other.

Occasionally songs like “Your Artist” give me hope there’s more to Hunxho than puffing out his already tall chest to impress the rest. “Every time my life get harder, I just get smarter/’Member us keep gettin evicted, now the bills caught up.” More of this Hunxho s’il vous plaît. I enjoy hearing him talk about how he took his hustle game to rap and made a clean living. I want that success for Hunxho and all of his Atlanta peers. I want everybody living the life Takeoff should be right now. And whether or not the gun talk is just tough talk, keeping it on wax is how you “get smarter” and succeed at life instead of doing life behind bars. “Not One of Them” doesn’t change the game, but it doesn’t make things worse than they were, and it’s a well produced half hour of music. That’s about all one can ask for any more.