The album opens with a vintage American crooner singing of lost love. For everyone’s sake, this needs to count But internet affection is fleeting, impatient and extremely conditional. So a mixtape, plagiarism dispute, and several European video shoots later, we’re here.The Thirteen track album ‘Dirt’ is an attempt to make good on the attention he’s found himself subject to.
Something about his conversational flow spat through grilled teeth, whilst brandishing a beer and the scrawled purple font displaying ‘arigato’ at the perfect moment seemed share worthy to the internet folk. Though Kohh was notably absent from several high profile American performances his contribution had been noticed by the songs admirers. Pretty soon Keith and his Cohort brothers, Okasion & JayAllDay could be seen on Youtube duppying mic, to engaged crowds. The free download turned into a viral smash, generating completely unexpected income and opportunity for the now major owned Hi-lite records. Kohh’s had status in his home city for a while now, but in truth the feature on Korean rapper Keith Ape’s IT G MA diversified his fanbase greatly.
Adorning themselves in bold Versace print and gleefully waving multiple packages of illicit substances at the camera, the Riverside Mobb have an unabashed recklessness less familiar to Japanese hip hop. More importantly it places Kohh among the fabric of the genre.Whilst rapping has long moved on from being exclusively the sport of the socially disadvantaged, the knowledge that Kohh’s widowed Mother wrestled with drug addiction and subsequently neglected him and his brother for large parts of their adolescence, starts to offer an insight into the forgotten children of a heavily ordered society.
Though a well worn ‘ghetto boy’ cliche ,that falsely limits viable options to escape poverty, it does intrigue you as to what a Tokyo highrise might look like. Meandering along the bridge with interviewer and chubby younger sibling ‘Lil Kohh’ the Yellow Tape’s star proclaims ‘I’m surrounded by people who stab people and are drug addicts but we chose not to follow that path and rap instead. It was in his February 2014 vice documentary Rising from the Tokyo projects.