Bizarre x Nolaj, Jclassic, D Noe, Lokye, Tru Klassick & Dango Forlaine "BLINKING LIGHT" [VIDEO]

Six MCs, six and a half minutes, and a description that reads, in full: "detroit underground." That's the whole pitch. The song comes through the channel of Bizarre D12's Bizarre and it opens with a voice rather than a verse: "Yeah, this is Nick Speed and we about to show you how the [__] Detroit is, man. How dirty it get." Nick Speed introducing a Detroit posse cut is the right framing, because Speed is one of the city's connective figures. He signed to G-Unit as an in-house producer in the mid-2000s, ran Libido Sounds with Elzhi, has production credits for 50 Cent, Danny Brown, Big Sean and Quavo, and co-curated the D-Cyphered exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He won a Detroit Music Award for it. When he says "how dirty it get," he's vouching. Of the six names on the track, four can be placed. Dango Forlaine who also records as Swan has been releasing steadily out of Detroit since his debut EP in 2018, with a run of producer-led projects including The Master, Mazmanadium and Airodyenamek; he appeared here earlier this year on "Kool & The Gang" with Chris Jose and Bozack Morris. Lokye is Brian H. Newman, a New York-born painter who runs the Granny's Chandelier gallery in Hamtramck, raps, and records and masters himself in what he calls the Detroit Goon Cave. Tru Klassick is Taylor Michael out of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, recording since 2006 first as T-Mic whose Mastah Chief and Halo Effect sit in a boom-bap and soul lineage. Nolaj is Jalon Perryman, Detroit-born and now Los Angeles-based, whose name is his first name backwards and is pronounced like "knowledge"; he built his audience through a weekly Nolaj Mondays series. The other two names can't be nailed down from here. Jclassic turns up on a Detroit producer's album as a featured verse. D Noe turns up nowhere that can be confirmed. What the verses themselves do is report rather than perform. "Came up off the fish scale shavings got imported. Get my own money. I ain't never need endorsements" is a statement of independence. "Raised in the early 90s, north side of the D" places the speaker. And there's a refrain running through the back half about wanting the city's sound back "we need our style back," "classic like when the vinyl touched the needle." For a track with no label, no listed producer and two words of description, that's a clear enough thesis: six voices arguing that Detroit's way of doing this is worth defending.

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