Today Mozzy released Mandatory Check, a tape I’ll write up elsewhere. The short version is: it’s good, but not a huge step forward, liable to bring new folks on board but only those predisposed to dig him. It’s also pretty bleak—have you heard this about him? One of the ways he makes all the Serious Bad Feeling shit hit a little harder is by surrounding it with a smidgen of sunlight, as if to underline the discomfort, keeping his art unpredictable, and drawing attention to how unaffected he is by the blood. See his recent collaboration with Hus Mozzy and SF-based street rapper G-Val, “Red Mob.”

This song (from Hus Mozzy’s Mozzy is the Motive) is pretty listenable. Although not really more than an enjoyable curio from the Mozzy catalog (to the extent that a song w/ the lyric “shells from the SK chewin your cheeks” can be considered enjoyable), it liberally samples Kano’s “I’m Ready,” a classic late ’70s floor filler that sounds good accompanied by anything this side of Chuck Klosterman reciting Doritos ingredients.

Luciano Ninzatti, Stefano Pulga, and Matteo Bonsanto formed Kano in 1979 at the beginning of a movement that would become known as Italo-Disco, because it was disco made in Italy. It tended towards the artificial, the electronic, and the cheesy; it inspired maybe a decade of hipster rediscovery in the 2000s, mainly tedious nights in which the mood is non-stop “uppers” with little sense of ebb or flow. The first time I heard Kano was filtered through Tag Team’s “Whoomp! There It Is.” But it’s been used several other times throughout hip-hop history, including Mac Dre’s “Adventures of Al Boo Boo” and Devin the Dude’s “Party” (“I love my chicken fried, my women wide, GMC trucks is all I ride”).