X – “Long Gone”

It becomes easy to lose sight of how rough street life is when listening to modern rap. If Migos, Rick Ross and 2 Chainz are to be believed, being born in the projects can seem fortuitous; through memetic phrases and clack-happy beats, they’ve spun poverty into prosperity, drug dealing into a dance of trade and legal battles, misogyny into female utility. Fantasy has overtaken true reality for so long that most listeners simply give in and trust the illusion.

It is this mindset that makes a track like “Long Gone” a sobering jab. X, the Houston rapper who penned this song, takes turns as a spectator, gangbanger and a vagrant, all three possibly stuck for an indeterminate period in Houston’s gritty Third Ward district.

Over a bleary horn loop, he views “the penitentiaries filled up” and the cops as a “gang, so they kill us”. Hookers service johns with or without a clean bill of health. In a fitting move, he references the glitz and glam embedded in “Beez In The Trap” but connects it with the real-world equivalent – selling hard white to the community.

X is as much of an enigma as he wants to purport, but this and other tracks on his SoundCloud carry the same weight of truth. In the moment, the denizens of the streets enjoy fleeting pleasures, but as the song suggests in its title, the dream of a better life has since been forgotten.