“Do feel me? /

They wanna persecute me /

Because I get money responsibly, ethically.”

Leave it to a hardcore punk band to craft one of the year’s best hip-hop songs. On March 4, Philadelphia group Soul Glo released “Driponomics” as the second single for their album Diaspora Problems. One could say it’s a barn burner — or more accurately a warehouse burner — as Soul Glo recorded the distorted, unrelenting masterwork in an abandoned warehouse in the midst of a sweltering 2021 summer. 

Summer is the perfect time for this song: It holds the type of head-banging rage that meshes best with scorching asphalt and the blinding sun. It deserves to be blasted from car speakers when you swear you could fry an egg on the top of your car’s hood, when you’re speeding along the cracking yellow lines of our perennially dying highways, when sweat is digging canals into the tiny striations of your pulsing, sunburnt skin.

Looking to the summer of 2022, one can imagine all the speedometers sweating as  cars begin to jump 10, 20, 30 mph with vocalist Pierce Jordan’s rampant lyrics leading the way in their torching of Reaganomics and the trickle-down philosophy. When the beat switches and Mother Maryrose slides onto the track, there’s no stopping that speedometer. Faster and faster and faster until the sun goes down and skid marks are left to cool. Perhaps a Supreme sticker still smolders on the bumper of a car or somewhere in tan grass.

As Jordan caps the song off: 

“Yeezy /

Nike /

Supreme still hot to the hypebeasts.”