After two decades of making music, many artists find the spark that once drove their creativity fizzling out. New Orleans rapper Curren$y began to make an impact from the very start of his career nearly 20 years ago, when he was called on to join the second iteration of 504 Boyz, a supergroup of sorts featuring many members of Master P’s No Limit Records family. Luckily for fans, Curren$y’s remarkable consistency hasn’t wavered even as he’s become a veteran in the rap game.
Back in the spring, he released Continuance, a collaboration with producer The Alchemist following up their 2011 outing Covert Coup. It isn’t exactly a departure from Curren$y’s typical output, but it deserves each of the many spots it’s likely to land on end-of-year lists. The Louisiana native sounds just as comfortable flowing over The Alchemist’s bare-bones-yet-mesmerizing beats here as he did early in his career on tracks like Lil Wayne’s “Grown Man” in 2005. That’s the thing with Curren$y’s music; fans can pretty much always know what to expect, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting and spectacular when it comes.
Part of Curren$y’s draw is the immense confidence that seeps from each and every bar he spits. He’s doing what he’s great at, and he knows it. Continuance opens with “Half Moon Mornings,” in which he raps: “I pictured the listening session for it while I was still in here rhyming / I could tell this project would be received well.”
After 20 years in the game, Curren$y isn’t necessarily breaking new ground; he touches on themes here that will be familiar to anyone who knows his catalog: his large car collection, drugs and his experiences growing up in the Crescent City are frequent topics. What makes Curren$y special are the new and creative ways he comes up with to approach his subjects, which scratch listeners’ brains in all the right places. Whether he’s describing his brown Range Rover with a tan interior as a “Reese’s cup out the freezer,” or somehow rhyming “shots fired,” “claim lives” and “G-ride” all in the same sentence, he uses every choice he makes about his words to draw you deeper into the story.
For many fans, Curren$y’s Pilot Talk series — with two volumes released in 2010, a third in 2015 and a fourth in 2021 — is his magnum opus. With a sound that leans more toward the era of Gangsta Grillz mixtapes and his Southern roots, the series showcases the rapper’s ability to adapt his laid-back, effortlessly cool style to just about any beat that gets thrown at him. Whether he’s rapping alongside New York legend Jadakiss over head-nodding drums and hypnotic flute loops on “Pot Tar” or trading verses with Mos Def and Jay Electronica over a screaming horn section on “The Day,” he always manages to hold his own, remaining one of the most unflappable rappers of the new millennium.
Despite the stellar releases that came before it, Continuance was still a delightful surprise for fans. (It’s not the only surprise this year: The Drive In Theatre Part 2, a follow-up to a much-loved 2014 release that was hailed as his best since the first two Pilot Talk albums, dropped on Black Friday.) Again and again, Curren$y proves himself to be an artist whose records are great for casual listening and reward you when you take the deep dive. The chemistry he and The Alchemist share on Continuance energizes both of them — they’re making exactly the music they want to make, and you can feel it.
A career in music is in many ways a grind, and it can wear artists down. Some, however, find a way to hold onto the hunger and tenacity that launched their artistic journey. While Curren$y may not always be thought of as standing in the Southern rap pantheon alongside figures like 8Ball & MJG, OutKast and Lil Wayne, he keeps showing us why he belongs there.
