Peezy Mails It In With 'Ghetto'

Detroit’s Peezy has his name etched in local rap lore. A founding — and at one point, the most popular — member of the Team Eastside collective, Peezy soundtracked everyday life in the region for a better part of the 2010s. Beyond his fruitful output, he also had an ear for talent, guiding cohorts like Babyface Ray and Damedot through the rough waters of the music industry and showcasing young talents; he’s actually the first one who signed Rio da Yung OG and helped put Flint rap on the map, setting that scene on a trajectory that has since taken on a life of its own.

While his peers were getting their feet off the ground, careers expanding, Peezy got hit with a RICO charge and had to spend the latter portion of 2019 and all of 2020 imprisoned. During this time, Babyface Ray became a critical darling of rap, Detroit scam music became TikTok famous, and other influential artists like Veeze saw a meteoric rise. On the day Peezy got out of prison, Babyface Ray noted that he felt an unspoken responsibility to take the reins as Detroit rap’s defacto figurehead, a role he hasn’t relinquished since.

In the years following his release, Peezy has been playing catch up with trends more than setting them (like on his canonical pre-prison projects No Hooks and No Hooks II). His new album, GHETTO, is no exception.

It’s an uninspired project that is comfortable with sacrificing a unique and riveting narrative style he excelled at for hackneyed, trend-hopping, generic Detroit Style Beats from YouTube and bars that could be written with ChatGPT (“Say my name one time, watch this bitch get litty,” he raps on “No Amiris”).

In 2022, Peezy struck Billboard gold with “2 Million Up,” a triumphant song over a modern G-Funk beat that sounds like dark clouds forming under blistering California sunshine. Since then, Peezy’s been comfortable following a similar formula of low-risk singles and album cuts, one that hasn’t resulted in a transformative creative renaissance nor a replication of his mainstream success from last year. 

Peezy makes it clear on the latest version of GHETTO that he’s still getting money, he still has the city on lock, and he still has the club going up, the same things we’ve been hearing about for years. Despite the unique array of features — Key Glock, Larry June, and BabyTron all turn in more memorable verses than Peezy on the album — once you’ve heard a random assortment of three songs on this project, you’ve heard them all. The 16-track, 46-minute effort is mostly an exercise in passive listening.

Occasionally, in the album’s best moments, when he’s not just mailing it in, Peezy tries something new, and sometimes it works. His pain raps on “What If”– delivered in the style of Jadakiss “Why?” questions — lament the death of his Team Eastside counterpart Snoop and hypothesize where he’d be if chance encounters had gone down differently. There’s real emotion and depth to this track, and a couple others like “Marni Slippers” and album closer “Blessed” with Ty Dolla $ign.

For better or worse, music is a more rewarding endeavor when you take risks, and for most of GHETTO, Peezy plays it safe. Thankfully, at his least inspired, Peezy is still a listenable artist who raps better than most of the field, but he’s capable of so much more.