Deniro Farrar – The Patriarch II

Deniro Farrar – The Patriarch II
Self-released: 2013

Dante “Deniro” Farrar’s body is literally divided in two. Do a quick Google image search and see what I mean: on one side are tattoos of holiness and light—there’s a beautiful rendering of Jesus in the crown of thorns, a tear sliding down his cheek, squarely on Farrar’s left arm. On his right side are tattoos of darkness—skulls, flames, et cetera. This helps to contextualize (if not explain) how the same guy can rap “I ain’t gonna rhyme about how I done fucked a million hos” on one song (the emphasis on “ain’t” is mine), and “I got white hos, black hos, Puerto Ricans and Asians/ That akaFRANK shit, bitch my dick ain’t racist” on a later one. This conflicted nature has always been a part of Farrar’s music. On his first mixtape, 2010’s Feel This, Deniro demanded that we not put him in one lane, and drew a distinction between his two sides. On his newest tape, The Patriarch II, he raps: “I live a double life because I’m part of the two percent of n***as that hate guns but love to shoot.” This makes him difficult to categorize—is he a “gangsta rapper”? A “conscious rapper”? Both? Neither?—and it also makes him interesting.

There are a few things we can say about Deniro Farrar with certainty, however: his music is deeply-felt and he writes from his life; he has great taste in beats; and he’s been working very hard the last couple years to try to make his situation better through his music. Just in the past eight months Deniro has dropped a glut of strong projects: the Shady Blaze collaboration Kill or Be Killed, the Cliff of Death EP with Blue Sky Black Death, and The Patriarch. Farrar’s newest tape, The Patriarch II, doesn’t exactly mark any big changes for the Charlotte rapper, but it does feel like it’s his most consistent, album-like release to date.

At 13 tracks and about 45 minutes, this is Farrar’s shortest, most easily-digested full-length. The beats are uniformly strong, with five tracks produced by Kira and another three by Ryan Alexy, giving the tape a cohesive sound. Deniro covers a range of material, but it’s all personal—as he says on “The Calling”: “[I] pour my soul in every verse for you . . . I’m body bagging everything, deliver it in a hearse for you.” A lot of the songs are about street life, his own past as a drug dealer with a felony charge on his record, his stress over money problems and his situation at home, and the criminal justice system as seen through the story of his younger brother Tune (more on this later).

I’m hesitant to single out individual tracks because The Patriarch II works so nicely as a whole, but certain songs keep pulling me back. The hypnotizing Kira-produced “Come Home” features a frigid hook by Toronto duo Prince Innocence that hints again at Deniro’s dual nature (“Come home, you’re two different people/ Come home and you’ll have to choose one”). Some of the most powerful moments on the tape come when Farrar reflects on his stress over becoming a dad, as on this track when he raps: “I can’t be nobody’s baby daddy/ ‘Cuz I’m out here with no paper feeling like I’m slack.” The beautiful Ryan Hemsworth production “Separate” (featuring JMSN) is Deniro Farrar at his most poetic: “Lovely spirits nowhere to go/ Lust for finer things, price tags on they souls/ Planted seeds, watch them grow/ Paper cuts on their hands from the dough.” The second verse on “Feel Right” finds him waxing unabashedly romantic, as he raps over a smooth Felix Snow beat: “Tattooed her name on me ‘cuz she’s special/ Treat her like a queen and respect her/ She’s a hundred, never fold under pressure/ She know I’m in the streets so she always gives me lectures.” And “Social Status”, which features a great hook by DuRu Tha King, is one of the most pop-friendly and upbeat things Farrar has released yet.

Throughout The Patriarch II (and its predecessor) you’ll hear Deniro say “free Tune.” Tune is Farrar’s twenty-year-old brother Tony, who in January of this year was arrested as a suspect in the murder of a 19-year-old named Benjamin McDaniel. In a prescient interview published just a month before Tune’s arrest, Deniro said: “I’m really worried about my little brother who’s out here pushing packs and dealing drugs.” The final track, “Free Tune”, ends with a taped phone conversation between the two. Deniro tells his younger brother that everything will be ok, and Tony tells Deniro that The Patriarch II is going to be a classic, and really do something for Farrar. It’s a bittersweet moment because these things could so easily not come true. But for Farrar’s sake I hope they do; he deserves success as much as anybody.

 

3.5 out of 5