Tase Grip Over Everything
Say hello to New York City’s next great rap collective.
Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.
If you ask Akai Solo, every show he plays is a Tase Grip show. The Brooklyn rapper is a compelling live presence on his own—his poetic and knotty raps, delivered in a lulling monotone on record, become booming edicts when he’s stagger-stepping across the stage. But no matter where he goes, members of Tase Grip are never far.
That much was clear during a Manhattan gig last August. Backed by Queens DJ-producer-engineer Wavy Bagels and a projection of the hit anime One Piece, a frequent touchstone in Akai’s writing, the rapper was playful but dead serious about his craft and his people. Any moment he wasn’t ribbing audience members for trying to run Fortnite on their Nintendo Switches (“Your TV’s gonna explode!”) was spent bigging up a producer or channeling the collective. Akai jumped into the crowd about halfway through his set, while the audience watched the wizardry unfold. Most everyone was entranced and staring, but the loudest were fellow Tase Grip members Bagels, Long Island rapper Phiik, and Brooklyn rapper S!lence, who cheered him on from the periphery, going bar-for-bar. That moment encapsulates the Grip ethos: Every solo member feeds back into the whole.
The unit consists of 12 core members doing some combination of rapping, producing, and engineering. Along with the aforementioned four, there’s Lungs, Gam, Amani, Ctyzn, Iblss, $hayButtah, Sejibeats, and Elric. Some are more prolific than others, and others have cycled in and out over time, but these are the main artists who currently make up the think tank.
As consistently phenomenal as their music is, it’s that trust, the desire to push themselves and each other without ego or malice, that makes Grip special to me. With most collectives, the seams usually show once one member takes off. But by all accounts, the rising tide continues to lift all boats. They still pop out at each other’s shows; still hold each other accountable for mistakes and making songs that don’t hit; still battle each other in Fortnite. “Nobody’s selfish, and that’s gonna take us the long way,” Bagels says. “If we’re not doing it for each other, then we can’t expect anybody outside to care about us.” That self-sustaining ethos permeates through their catchphrase, one that most of its members repeat ad nauseum at shows, in interviews, and during taped performances: “Tase Grip over everything.”
