{"id":76842,"date":"2025-08-18T07:02:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T07:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/76842\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T07:02:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T07:02:07","slug":"rio-da-yung-og-f-l-i-n-t-feeling-like-im-not-through-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/76842\/","title":{"rendered":"Rio Da Yung OG: F.L.I.N.T. (Feeling Like I\u2019m Not Through) Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rio Da Yung OG<\/a> is a rapper who truly lives up to his name. The Michigan-born, self-proclaimed shit-talker has seen more in 31 years than most will in their entire life. To return from federal prison after nearly half a decade without snitching or having a mental breakdown is akin to graduating with a PHD for a career criminal. Perhaps that\u2019s why Rio has come back sounding like if Red from Shawshank Redemption started rapping, as if he were the wisest inmate in the prison, a young man unfortunate enough to have seen it all by age 30, sentenced to spend a lifetime doling out invaluable advice to some of the country\u2019s slimiest crooks, couched between vulgar asides and gallows humor, just to make sure he doesn\u2019t lose anybody\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

F.L.I.N.T. (Feeling Like I\u2019m Not Through) is Rio\u2019s not-so-subtle way of bringing some positive attention to his hometown of Flint, MI, a city most people outside of the state only know about because of its infamous water crisis in 2014. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally lifted its emergency order<\/a> on Flint’s lead-laden drinking water in May 2025, but many residents remain skeptical<\/a>. Rio\u2019s pre-prison 2020 mixtape, City on My Back<\/a>, implied his mission to carry his beleaguered hometown out of the mud and back onto the field. F.L.I.N.T., which was released on the city\u2019s annual 810 Day, named after the region’s area code, is an acknowledgment to just how far he\u2019s carried it, becoming the first rapper in the city with a platinum record. \u201cI\u2019m just a little dirty kid from Flint, I never seen nothing,\u201d he says on album-opener, \u201cDifferent Music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rio\u2019s long been an artist best consumed via YouTube loosies and one-off singles. Past projects feel like they were put together as an afterthought, but never in a way that harmed the product much. The cobbled-together feel actually added to his shit-talking, \u201cI am not a rapper\u201d mythos. Even more recent projects like the understandably hurried Rio Free<\/a> feel like a string of random songs. F.L.I.N.T., on the other hand, is Rio\u2019s most complete body of work to date. It maintains a novel-like quality, filled with poetic irony and literary repetition. \u201cAnother Story\u201d is a masterclass in storytelling, a Tarantino-esque tale told brilliantly with little context, as if Rio were regaling us with his life story from the bottom bunk of a two-man cell. He uses humor not just for laughs, but as a weapon to expose and process the pain, absurdity, and contradictions of his environments. He manages to squeeze in phrases like \u201cbutt-napkin\u201d next to lines like \u201cPulled up to my granny\u2019s house and I just bust\u2019 out crying, she said \u2018you know how the streets go, old folks don\u2019t be lying.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rio Da Yung OG is a rapper who truly lives up to his name. The Michigan-born, self-proclaimed shit-talker…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[12327,64,63,134,136,1672],"class_list":["post-76842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}