Turned Into a 72 Hour Investigation

Project Pat - We Can Get Gangster

There are points about this song I’ll bring up later, but this is more a story about a dude named Lightning Bolt.

When I was eighteen I moved to Austin at the invitation of one of my closest friends. He knew of the friction I was living with at home and that I needed a direction out. He had another friend who suggested we rent at the apartment complex she lived in and two weeks later without ever seeing the place I loaded two garbage bags of clothes and my banged up guitar into his car and we drove the two and half hours from our childhoods towards the future.

It was perfectly squalid. We had no money. I slept on an inflatable mattress, dyed my hair purple, got tattooed and mastered instant ramen. We lived above an ex-con, who would invite us down to his back stoop and we would drink forties of Old English or St Ides while he held court on what to be aware of if we ever ended up in jail. He also liked smoking crack. I’m not romanticizing or stereotyping any of this, it’s just the truth. We stayed there nine months.

After the first few weeks in town my savings were dust. Again, at the suggestion of my friend-now-roommate, I applied for work at Chili’s using his cousin as a reference. I got the job, a busser, although they may have had a more enticing title for it. It was an awful and demeaning environment. During the six months I clocked in and out, I was consistently looked down upon, earning the nickname ‘Bus Rat’; there was no way to earn respect from any of the front of house staff or management. But whatever, I didn’t want to be there anyway.

I did make an impression with the kitchen staff though by way of mixtapes.

Back-end staff had to arrive an hour and a half prior to opening, and prep time meant music cranked loud. At home, I’d make mixes for the week; rap, punk, heavy metal and various sound bites from movies and Sesame Street. My tapes were quality and earned me a reputation with the line cooks, particularly with the shift leaders JR and Lightning Bolt.

Lightning worked day shift. I never knew his given name but Lightning Bolt suited him, and that’s all anyone was allowed to call him anyway, management included. He fancied himself a player, a pimp moonlighting as a cook. He was smooth, with his syrupy southern drawl dripping charm, but I’d occasionally see flashes of his frustration with reality: a Black man in his thirties flinging plates of Awesome Blossoms and battered Chicken Tenders while white college kids earned more than him in tips. It came out as a nasty temper that became a bit menacing a few times. I understand this more clearly now as commentary of how divided Austin was, and still is, based on race and opportunity, and as the classic schism of townies vs college kids.

When Lighting was in a good mood though, he freestyled. This routine developed because I always included instrumentals on those mixes and as his freestyling became more frequent, I made tapes that were more beat heavy specifically for Lightning to weave his tales of pimpdom over. I thought his rhymes were corny, and his flow basic but I liked that it endeared me to him. Because of the radio shows I’d listened to in Houston, my tastes were more East Coast jeep knockers and Cali underground, but I’m Houston through and through and loved Rap-A-Lot and Luke Skyywalker too. Lightning was OG; tight blue jeans, dark and creased, jheri curl, lightning bolt necklace. I knew what beats he liked most.

He’d go off on the more laid back Southern beats. I only realized within this past year that I just didn’t get something at the time. It’s likely what I thought as basic was rooted in my ignorance of what really was playing away from the college rap radio shows I strictly listened to. Hood shit. He talked a lot about demos he was going to make, but I never took him seriously. It all just seemed like more pimp shit talk. He may actually have been good and I was just clueless.

Project Pat is one of my favorite emcees, and I can’t think of many others that lay down a story like him and it’s why I bring up Lighting Bolt. Pat’s single Chickenhead was my first glimpse of his greatness, but it was really more of a novelty to me at the time. I especially loved the back and forth take down in the second verse between him and the female emcee La Chat:

La Chat: Yeah you like my outfit don't even fake tha deal
I thought you said you had your girl on the light bill

Project Pat: Always in my face talkin' this and that
Girl I had to buy some rims for da Cadillac

La Chat: Ya ridin' clean but ya gas tank is on E
Be steppin' out ain't got no descent shoes on ya feet

Project Pat: That's just the meter broke, youn't kno'cha talkin' bout
Anyway them new Jordans finna come out

There’s such an honesty to that. Men, we know how much insecure shit we have talked at some point in our lives to weasel out of admitting the truth to women. And they cut through our shit with such clarity that it actually is that funny. We are only fooling ourselves, he shows us. The Juicy J and DJ Paul verses that follow bogs this down though; the braggadocio ruins the previous vulnerability like an obnoxious friend cutting in and I usually turn it off before those verses start.

I can’t deny the misogyny that pops up in his lyrics and it’s something I have a hard time rationalizing when it comes to rap music, and especially Southern rap. I approach it with the same unease as I do with elements of Black Metal, and somehow in the case of rap I reluctantly give it more of a pass than I should. There are certainly things said on Project Pat’s album Mista Don’t Play: Everythangs Workin that I have to reckon with.

This song isn’t one of those moments. Here, Pat tells the story of how in 2001 he ended up in prison on a gun charge, a violation of his parole.. It’s as gangster as Gucci Mane’s Truth, the hardest diss track of all time, where Guwop reminds Young Jeezy that he shot his cousin in self-defense (and was acquitted for it in the subsequent trial).

Pat pulls the listener in with a perfect and simple opening line:

I got a call from my dawg, Gangster Fred, just tha other day

and then proceeds to give the lowdown on why he had the guns in his car when he was later pulled over, arrested and booked for the parol violation. His distinct delivery is poetry in motion; there are few who can ride a beat like Project Pat and I can’t think of any emcee that has built so much on annunciation. He understands syllables, he never forces them, like the great Aceyalone line prescribes on the Freestyle Fellowship song Danger.

If it don’t fit, don’t force it, just relax and let it flow

Lately I’ve been reading more about writing tips, and I’m trying to make myself more aware of the rhythm of my sentences and the power of editing. Project Pat is cutthroat on his text; his words have the same effect on me as the words of Hubert Selby, Jr; they are blunt and brutish and feel like being hit across the face with a slab of meat. The production is Three Six Mafia at their best midway point between the horror show darkness of their earlier tapes and the cocaine and Hennessy gangster polish of Stay Fly.

Which brings me full circle to Lightning Bolt. I’ll never know if he was actually good and just didn’t have the support to get that anywhere outside that sweaty Chili’s kitchen. I know if Project Pat didn’t have his brother Juicy J and Three Six Mafia, we’d have never heard what he was capable of, as he has said as much. I think about Lightning and wonder about the countless other tales we never heard, and wonder if he might have also been a victim of time, before the South got up and broke through that wall of rap industry ignorance that was keeping it from the respect it deserved, and before it changed, then dominated the rap game. In that sense, the cultural sense, the (Dirty) South did rise again.

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