The most astonishing lyric on a significant album in the year of the pandemic may be this from "NOTHIN LESS," the closing track on CONWAY THE MACHINE's FROM KING TO A GOD: "Two shooters by the door and they grippin' the thirty / That's why they both got fifty pointers like Mitchell and Murray." I should preface this by acknowledging that, while I assume the Buffalo rapper is describing two people with guns near the entrance of a local restaurant called DOCTOR BIRD (that detail is from an earlier line), I otherwise have no idea what's he's talking about. Conway's cadence and the music, produced by DJ PREMIER with a MOBB DEEP sample, sell it for me; the specifics of the lyrics go over my head, which is fine, I'm not the primary audience, except for the sports reference at the end of that imperfect rhyme, which I do get. On Aug. 23, DONOVAN MITCHELL of the UTAH JAZZ and JAMAL MURRAY of the DENVER NUGGETS became the first opponents in NBA playoff history to score 50 points in the same game. The album, one of a string of high-profile albums released this summer and fall by GRISELDA RECORDS, came out 19 days later, on Sept. 11. The Nuggets were still in the middle of their next playoff series. I get that pre-release promotion isn't what it used to be, especially in hip-hop, that album release dates are a lot more fluid than they once were, and that technology has changed the speed of production. But two and a half weeks between basketball game and full-length album with closing track that cites details from that game is still amazing. And quite possibly its own kind of first. Mind blown. Respect... Griselda is an underground label and crew from Buffalo whose core artists include Conway, his brother WESTSIDE GUNN—the label's mastermind—and cousin BENNY THE BUTCHER, all of whom have been at it for years and all of whom have released notable albums in the past five weeks as the label continues to edge its way into hip-hop's spotlight. There's a '90s throwback vibe to the stripped-down, hardcore production and the drug-fueled, often-violent storytelling, which is meant to reflect their lives. (Westside Gunn did two stints in prison between 2005 and 2011, and Conway was a shooting victim in 2012.) "People can say the words and make it rhyme and sound good," Conway told NPR last year. "But if you know, you know. It's easy to tell if somebody just put some words together well, or if they really, was out there, really was outside." Or, as he puts it in "Nothin Less," "I ain't never satisfied, so I have to go harder." The sound is anti-pop, almost defiantly. The Griselda philosophy is rap about what you know, sound like who you are, and let the world find you. "In a period in which regionalism in hip-hop has fallen to the wayside and the rattling percussives of the South reign supreme," LEX PRYOR wrote in the Ringer, "Gunn sticks out like a sore thumb." The underground found the crew first, and though it took some years, the world would follow, meaning, for starters, the hip-hop elite and the fashion elite. Griselda is now affiliated with EMINEM's SHADY RECORDS and managed by JAY-Z's ROC NATION. The sound hasn't changed but the times have. MusicSET: "Buffalo Soldiers: The Rise of Westside Gunn and Griselda Records"... The all-day all-night all-music-video service APPLE MUSIC TV launched Monday on both the APPLE MUSIC and APPLE TV apps. First-day programming was a repeating countdown of the 100 all-time most-streamed songs on Apple Music (minus, it appeared, a handful of songs that don't have videos). There was lots and lots of DRAKE, who showed up, symmetrically, at both #100 (as a guest on MIGOS' "WALK IT TALK IT") and #1 (his own "GOD'S PLAN"). As for the service: Should it? Can It? Does It? I'll have more to say later in the week... Following WARNER MUSIC GROUP's IPO in June, a "group of senior execs" shared $593 million in stock bonuses... BACKXWASH wins the POLARIS PRIZE... There are 1,463 official entries for Record of the Year at the 2021 GRAMMYS, 418 for Best Rock Song and 41 for Best Regional Roots Music Album. More numbers here... It's TUESDAY and this is the #1 single in both the US and the UK... RIP Ibiza legend JOSÉ PADILLA.