Larry June and the Alchemist’s Love Letter to the Bay Area Is a Delight
June makes the case there’s nowhere better to unwind than the Bay. (Edgar Chaparro)
Baydestrian hip hop heads have reason to rejoice this spring. Bayview-raised rapper Larry June linked with producer the Alchemist to put out The Great Escape in March. The album is a love letter to Northern California, travel and leisure, and working to control what one can in life. The emcee is famous for his love of natural living, including partnering with Richmond natty wine purveyors Purity for a limited release orange wine. June talks extensively about business, taxes, and monitoring the numbers floating through one’s bank account. But he does so as the first step in an equation to solve, as in setting oneself up in as smart a way as they can allows them to have a really good time doing dope shit.
To that end, the first song is a specific form of escapism. June waxes on “Turkish Cotton” about the intelligence of forming a corporation, relying on your own smart planning. Set to Alchemist’s rainy then ballooning beats, one remembers how June has constructed his own passive income to allow for styling, including his tea shop Honeybear Boba in San Francisco’s Dogpatch. On “Ocean Sounds” June talks about how happy he is to find a true love, and driving his Corvette to Half Moon Bay for green tea. But by the end of the song he confesses that he’s talking about the love he has for himself. “Love is when you’re happy with yourself,” June says. “Think I need another vacation.”
And he keeps traveling. From supping on abalone by the water to driving down the highway, it’s all moolah. On “60 Days” we find June spending “two days in Napa Valley, eating saganaki,” as one does. The two artists blur together easy, their chemistry a reflection of the album cover: the Golden Gate Bridge peers at a hand gripping the steering wheel of a sports car, a jaunty yellow driving glove and expensive-looking watch strapped on the wrist. The image itself is a Bay Area fantasy, to rip over the bridge with horns and beats playing you off. All this makes sense given the Alchemist’s features with Action Bronson on “Fuck That’s Delicious,” a show all about the indulgent, escapist lifestyle. Bronsalino features early on this album, too, setting a YOLO tone that thrums beneath each beat and bar.
Toward the end of the album June asks what happened to the world on an eponymously titled song. The Alchemist keeps the question top of mind with an insistent, progressive bass line. In characteristic fashion, June — in chorus with Wiz Khalifa — turns to what he knows best: keeping control of the numbers, the ins and outs, and moving along as he travels from coast to coast. A sample has a gravely-voiced man saying he was influenced by an “infestation of diamonds.” Seconds later on “Éxito” June says he’s ahead of that madness, this time driving on the Pacific Coast Highway. And, as Vonnegut wrote, so it goes.
Much-loved and much-hated music outlet Pitchfork gave the album a 7.6, pointing to June’s lack of adventurousness in his rapping and citing Big Sean’s inclusion as a white flag. While the review is a relative high watermark, the album hits different for those in the NorCal region. If you’ve never slurped mussels at a fine dining restaurant in Big Sur or “pushed a raury down the I-5,” then you couldn’t know the splendor this album trumpets. And the brass tacks, hard-working ethos June carries fits so well along this backdrop, as his narrative reaches another important point in his work hard play hard mantra: self-care.
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