The this-is-how-they-get-down-in-my-city rap song doesn’t ever get played out. It’s the sorta audio neighborhood tour that’s been grounding the autofiction of hip-hop storytelling since the early days of the genre. In my personal hall of fame: Master P’s “Welcome to My City” where he describes New Orleans as a hotbed of gold teeth, crooked cops, and dudes running around with nicknames like Big Man; and Jay-Z’s incredibly visual “Where I’m From,” which brings his mythmaking down to Earth.
J1, a drill rapper of sorts from Fort Myers, carries on that tradition. On his new mixtape, 1 IN A MILLION, he channels Jigga with a “Where Im From” of his own. Over triumphant trap-soul fit for a Nike commercial, the wick-rocking Floridian narrates the ongoings of his stomping grounds on the state’s southwestern tip—known to me for their youth football culture; seriously, I watched one J1 interview and all of a sudden my entire YouTube algorithm was 8U football highlights—like he’s the hometown guest on an episode of No Reservations. With vivid clarity, he points out the local fashion, the importance of the city’s Easter Day Parade, and spots where you can dine on a good breakfast or tear up an order of chicken wings, while at the same time describing a place where you’re just as likely to run into a former NFL star (Sammy Watkins, Deion Sanders) as a middle school student carrying a gun. The geographical specificity personalizes the tape’s drill-inspired clichés.
That sense of place goes a long way in immersing you into J1’s world, whether the tone is deadly serious or lightly comical. On “Bob Da Builder,” J1 isn’t just beefing with any gangster, but one who also works as an air-conditioner repairman—a character so particular, he has to be based in some truth. (J1 tries to make fun of the guy, but man, fixing A/Cs on the west coast of Florida seems like a pretty essential job.) Elsewhere, what could be paint-by-numbers details—smoking on Black & Milds, filling up his tank before going on money-getting road trips, and arguing with a woman asking for money for her bills after the first date—are instead so evocative, they play like throwaway scenes in a No Limit goof-off like I Got the Hook-Up. He deploys the same level of color when the mood shifts dark: from the flood of childhood flashbacks he experiences after watching a friend die outside the club on the meditative “Early” to the Boosie-like vent session of “Stressin Me,” down to his unreliable narration of his baby’s mother’s attitude.
There’s not much on 1 IN A MILLION that will blow you away; the beats are of the same unmiraculous mold—Michigan brute force meets Louisiana jig—that has been holding down Florida street rap for the last half-decade, and the lyrics rarely jump off the page on their own. If you aren’t paying close attention, it might even sound like it could come from a dozen other Southern cities. But the more you zoom in on J1’s delivery, the clearer it becomes that that’s not the case: a raw, slow drip of punchlines that get all their meaning from the unpredictable emphasis placed on certain words. The stylistic touch, used by new age hitmakers like Bossman Dlow and central to the foundational goon music of fellow Fort Myers baby Plies, screams Florida. I’d know where J1 was from even if he wasn’t repping so hard.