Given how much incredible music is coming out of the city’s North Side rap scene, it’s stupefying how little of it is available on the music streaming services your probably pay for. You won’t find some of Milwaukee’s best rap on Spotify or Apple Music. Instead it’s scattered across a chaotic web of Soundcloud pages and YouTube accounts, making it difficult for even the most devoted connoisseurs to keep track of it all. A regional hit like Lil Chicken’s “Story of My Life” can run the city all summer without ever making its way onto Spotify. It’s part of the reason, I suspect, that Milwaukee rap doesn’t yet have the reach it deserves: It's too hard to find it.
This counts as progress, though: Gwapo Chapo has a new album up on Apple Music and Spotify. Two weeks ago the magnetic Milwaukee rapper shared his latest project, Get a Bag or Die Trying, and while it includes only a fraction of the music he’s released this year, it’s a convenient entry point for listeners looking to get acquainted with one of the Milwaukee rap scene’s most gregarious entertainers.
Gwapo Chapo raps about much the same streetwise subject matter as his peers, but he does so with more flair than most, filling his verses with non-sequiturs, punchlines and pop-culture references (Scooby Doo, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Winnie the Pooh all get nods on the tape, and he gives his tracks titles like “Jimmy Neutron,” “Blues Clues” and “DragonBallz”). He’s also got a voice that just glides over every track, a frictionless slur with echoes of prime Gucci Mane.
Again, there’s a lot of prime material missing here. In just the two weeks since its release, Gwapo has dropped a couple videos for tracks that would have been great additions to the album, “Im Coo” and “Sound Good” (on that one he references Freddy Krueger then rhymes it with David Gruber, which is inspired). It’d be nice if those made their way onto proper streaming services, too. But in the meantime, there’s a Gwapo Chapo album you can play on your iPhone now, and that’s worth celebrating.
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You can stream Get a Bag or Die Trying below, along with those videos for his latest singles. And if you’re looking for more, Gwapo Chapo also has an album with his frequent collaborator Looney Baby up on iTunes, Splash Bros 2. It's great.
