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Some received the song as a message to Moneybagg’s “haters.” Perhaps. In the original song, two minutes of Moneybagg’s merciless monotone, he says that he can get gangsta (clocking out) or keep it cordial (professional), but he still doesn’t like anybody. The production, from Real Red (Jorres Nelson) and YC (Christopher Pearson), is an intoxicating grind.

There’s also a version of it that went meme-platinum, last year, as an audio clip on TikTok, lip-synced by users aching to join the Great Resignation: “Time Today” is the Top 40 lead single from Moneybagg’s “A Gangsta’s Pain,” which went to No. It will give you the patience to take a breath and blink slowly and move without fear through any space, from back alleys to sports bars with hockey on all 11 screens. This is a song that will straighten your spine. might start off his persona-​building by calling himself Moneybagg, and end up making a little ditty called “Time Today.” So you see why a person with the harmonious name DeMario DeWayne White Jr. Moneybagg’s Walker Homes neighborhood is a place you probably have no business being if you don’t have people over there. He’s from the part of South Memphis that my Memphis friend says is home to strip malls with no stores, big industrial parks and people trying mightily to make a life. That’s why, these days, it’s straight to Moneybagg Yo for me. We were, suddenly, a “generation,” with our own things. I mean, somebody Black named Big Bank Hank was calling himself a “grandmaster”! My Los Angeles school was multiracial because of mandatory busing, and our student body could (on its best days) feel in line with Sugarhill’s Wonder Mike rapping, “I’d like to say Hello/To the Black and the white/The red and the brown/The purple and yellow.” My logic: Going with Zepp’s grandiosity meant clinging to a reality that no longer existed. Back then, Cheryl Lynn, Chuck Brown, and Rufus and Chaka churned alongside Donna Summer and Funkadelic, and even the Knack’s “My Sharona” sounded Black - but it was Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight” that put the playground on tilt.

That’s how I got into rap, when it was new: as an early-’80s middle schooler arguing against Led Zeppelin’s decade-old “Stairway to Heaven” for class song. I crave even the weariness that comes with bracing for attack, my armor as heavy as the volume is high. These are my favorite rap songs - the songs that say these things.

Illustration by Lennard Kok This is who I am.