On November 25, less than 24 hours after the Chicago Police Department belatedly released a dashcam recording of officer Jason Van Dyke shooting and killing Laquan McDonald, local rapper Ty Money dropped “United Center,” whose video consists exclusively of edited footage from that recording. The song’s instrumental track accompanies its solemn piano melody with sizzling guitars and muffled, ominous bass that booms like an underground explosives test, and in his lyrics Money mulls over the systemic injustices that afflict Chicago’s black community and make the city’s racial divide feel like the Grand Canyon. Animating his rapid-fire rhymes with a storyteller’s eye for detail, he describes a world of crooked cops, murder victims under white sheets, and mothers with no stoves struggling to feed their children.
In just a couple lines, Money can evoke, say, the anxiety of seeing your fortunes evaporate: on “Viet Cong” he raps, “Runnin’ out of money / I ain’t ever seen it, like a unicorn.” Raybon unloads truckloads of syllables in a fast, fluid flow that zigzags between beats. Like BB-8 in The Force Awakens, he can switch pace and direction dramatically while barely seeming to swerve at all. On “Come Again” he even holds his own next to Twista, longtime king of supersonic stanzas.
In the early 2000s, Money would go to teenage parties at the Markham Roller Rink, taking in sets of ghetto house, juke, and footwork by producers such as DJ Thadz, DJ Slugo, and DJ Spinn. “If you wasn’t at Markham Roller Rink on Saturday you wasn’t shit,” he says. Every weekend Raybon he’d head to the rink, then take the party to his mom’s house nearby—usually accompanied by one of his cousins, Isaiah Driver, who raps as I.D.
“Whenever we put out something, our city embraced it—whenever we threw a show, people would come out,” Metcalfe says. “Harvey World was very receptive to our movement because we were representing Harvey. Once you got a whole city of people, then you can take over the whole south suburbs. That kind of gave us the ammunition to get us the support from Chicago.”
Money didn’t end up signing a deal with Grand Hustle, but the growing outside interest in his career influenced his second mixtape, 2014’s stylistically broad The Turn Up G.H.O.D. The influence wasn’t all good, though: “I had a lot of people in my ear,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Man, we need this type of song, we need that type of song.’ So I ran with it. And you can kind of hear it. It sounds a little more corporate. I had a lot of features on there because [the process] was a little more political.” In contrast with Free Money, which he’d rushed through, The Turn Up G.H.O.D took about six months to record. It features contributions from the likes of King Louie and Chief Keef, but Money wasn’t happy with how much control he’d given up—and the release didn’t attract the accolades he thought it deserved.
