194 words about Bruiser Wolf's Dope Game Stupid

Remember the first time you heard XXX? Yeah.

Detroit-based rap collective Bruiser Brigade seems to have been driven by pandemic to a spreader party of unseemly beats, filthy verses, and ZelooperZ-splattered album covers (all of which are the best). A string of recent releases has culminated now in Bruiser Wolf’s Dope Game Stupid. It goes dumb. It goes stupid. In case you don’t follow, it goes brilliant. Bruiser Wolf has a singular cadence and voice: staggered and slick, nasally, a spiked mucus drip of laughter and stupor. The lyrics here are so wry they’re black. “She bust it open / like a pinata / She had twins / But each baby / had a different father.” Gutter loops chortling in the background, Wolf’s raps are ripe with dark seeds, each a pointed reminder of what rap can do that nothing else can -- welding a hundred vivid stories, a hundred decrepit jokes, and poetry’s most angular forms, then riveting the seams. The vision is whole, the sound thick. There’s a thrill similar to the first time I heard XXX by Danny Brown (the Bruiser Godfather). Dope Game Stupid picks up the sputtering but scorching hot torch and throws it at the night.