Papiseed Street Vol. 2: Wiki lets the records do the talking

Papiseed Street Vol. 2 is Wiki off duty. It landed on October 31, a few months after Ancient History, and it is a more casual record than that album by design: borrowed hits, Wiki's voice over the top, nothing polished into a statement.

He has been a fixture of New York's underground rap scene for a decade. Lil Me arrived in 2015, No Mountains in Manhattan in 2017, then OOFIE, Half God and Telephonebooth inside three years, Cold Cuts in 2022, 14K Figaro and Faith Is a Rock in 2023, and Ancient History earlier this year. The catalogue is long. The voice has not changed much across it.

Papiseed Street started in 2023. Volume two keeps the premise: a mixtape full of samples, built to be played loose. The beats here flip Big Pun, Ashanti, French Montana, the Bravehearts and Company B, and the voice of Oscar The Grouch runs through the tape and holds it together, the way it did the first time.

Each flip drops a hook the room already knows, and Wiki's job is to sound like he belongs on top of it. He mostly does. There is personality in the delivery and no strain in it, which is the difference between a tape like this working and sounding like an exercise in clearance paperwork.

What he does with that room is talk his shit, at length, over records that were not built for him. The freewheeling feel is deliberate. Nothing here is arranged to build. It accumulates, one borrowed hook after another, and the pleasure is in the overlap between what you already remember and what he puts on top of it.

Oscar The Grouch is the thread. It is a joke that lasts about as long as a joke should, and it gives the tape a host, which a pile of flips otherwise would not have. It covers joins that sequencing would have to earn.

This is for people who played Ancient History twice and want the looser version, and for anyone who keeps a stack of records around for exactly this reason. It is not the place to start with Wiki, and it is not trying to be.

The borrow is the ceiling. When the best eight bars on a track belong to someone else's chorus, the tape is renting its high points, and the moments that land hardest are the ones where the source is thinnest and Wiki has to fill the space himself. The Oscar conceit is the other limit. A host voice is a way of not writing transitions, and the tape leans on it whenever the samples run out of lift.

3.5, then, for a holding pattern with better records under it than most artists get on top. Wiki can carry a room. Next time, let him carry the songs too.

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