MexikoDro pulls up to a Texaco gas station in a vintage Chevy Monte Carlo the color of blue raspberry cotton candy. He steps out of the spotless whip in slow motion, wearing a Dickie jumpsuit with a wash rag in his hand that makes him look like he just finished a shift at the autoshop down the road. Without cracking a smile, he buffs his rims until they gleam and leans against his two-door coupe. This is the scene that opens his music video for “No Date,” which nails the grainy shot-on-the-block feel of the 2000s car-centric rap footage you might find in Houston, Memphis, or his hometown, Atlanta. If you’re nostalgic for a more insular and country era of ATL rap, “No Date,” with its video and horn-blaring trap beat that calls back to the heyday of Shawty Redd, might give you butterflies.
Somewhere in Atlanta, MexikoDro answers my video call. He’s parked on the side of the road in a leafy green suit, fresh off a court appearance that he says went well enough that he plans to celebrate with a plate of mussels. Surrounded by trees, his phone connection is so shaky that you would think he was stranded on Mars like Matt Damon in The Martian. “I’m gonna throw this fuckin’ phone,” he says, frustrated, looking off into the woods long enough that I think he’s for real. Before the interview my friend EricTheYoungGawd described Dro to me as a “serious-ass nigga, about his business,” and, once you interact with him, you’ll find that is truly the case.
I mention the word “nostalgia” to Dro and he immediately shoos away that term. “I grew up in the A; that was my childhood, so if you folks calling it nostalgic, you thinking about it on different terms than me,” he says, looking me dead in the eyes through the phone. Nevertheless, the more we talk, the more you can feel that he has a deep longing for an Atlanta of the past; the rawness of the snap era, the honesty of T.I.’s debut, I’m Serious, which he has been playing a lot lately. Eventually he explains, “Atlanta ain’t even Atlanta no more. Who the hell these folks is? I just met somebody in Atlanta from Wyoming. Every time I would get locked up, I would come back and shit would change.” One core memory he has is from 2015 or 2016 when he was in Fulton County Jail. Out in the distance, he could sometimes see the $1.6 billion Mercedes-Benz Stadium being built. That was when he realized the Atlanta he remembers was changing.
“No Date,” produced by BapeBrazy, has been one of the breakout Atlanta underground rap songs of the year because MexikoDro feels like a throwback to a kind of heart-on-his-sleeve, blue-collar rapper who’s harder to come by in the performative internet era. It’s down to Earth go-getter music, where hard-earned life lessons from years of legal troubles, drinking too much, and music industry drama brush up against ordinary day-in-the-life-details: shopping for new rims, mowing his lawn, and cleaning his house. One lyric I like a lot from a recent IG snippet is “I like to chill, sometime I hit the bar/I feel peace when I’m workin’ on my car” because it sounds like the sort of thing that could have been rapped to comic effect by Devin the Dude back in the day. The low-key banality of his writing paired with the booming hustle-hard beats is sort of funny, though I don’t think he would agree.
“I just write about what’s going down in my life,” he says of his process.
I ask, “What’s something you did in life that you wrote about recently?”
He thinks long and hard before saying, “I said something about buying my dog a hammock. I just did that; I bought that motherfucker. I got a Belgian Malinois, and she needs to run around and have her space. She smart. My dog know how to turn the tub water on and drink the water while I’m asleep.”
The more familiar you are with MexikoDro, the more “No Date” feels like an unexpected triumph. Over a decade ago, he made his name as a producer, which he started taking seriously as a teenager when none of the local sandwich shops he applied to would hire him. Quickly, he made noise with production crew the Beat Pluggz, who pioneered “plugg,” an essential underground subgenre that took on a life of its own on SoundCloud. Spearheaded by Dro, their beats stitched together elements of Atlanta production that came before them—snap era bounce, futuristic era grooves, Zaytoven’s smoothness—into dreamy, slinky, chilled-out instrumentals that sounded like Atlanta reimagined for a new world. These days, plugg is immortalized for the launch of Playboi Carti, where Dro’s breezy, swaggy beats for word-of-mouth smashes like “Broke Boi,” “Plug,” “Don’t Tell Nobody,” “Chill Freestyle,” and more helped to build Carti’s myth.
But you know how it goes: Dro’s beats were stolen; his sound got oversaturated by the rise in “type beats”; and, by the time Carti dropped his debut mixtape, the rapper had moved onto working with Pi’erre Bourne, Dro on just one song. Over the years, plugg has gone through multiple eras and rebirths, one that is still going pretty strong today, albeit with an increasingly thin connection to Atlanta. Dro never really had the chance to benefit from all of that, having to settle for the somewhat thankless status of “underground legend.”
Whenever we speak about plugg, Dro is visibly disinterested and slightly annoyed. “I don’t miss nothing about that time,” he admits. “From 16 to about 25, that was the worst years of my life. The music was successful enough, but I just kept getting locked up and getting in my own way. I remember I was trying to be a kid. Trying my damn hardest to be a kid. Life was real good ’til it hit me in my head.” In that time, he started tinkering with a form of intimate motivation rap that shaped his hardships into optimism and pulled from the grounded Southern rap on which he grew up: Project Pat, Ghetto Mafia, Bankroll Fresh. Getting those influences out of him was a challenge, though, and when I first ask, he responds sarcastically: “I’m influenced by an artist named MexikoDro. I think he’s real good. Ever heard of him?”
Now 29, Dro pretty much keeps to himself. He says on most days you’ll find him hanging out with his dogs, making beats, and working on his cars. “Right now, I’m working on my kickdown linkage on my ’85 Monte Carlo,” he says. “I can’t be driving some shit that look good on the outside, but fucked-up on the inside.” Infused into his mundane, bluesy trap music is a lone wolf spirit that comes from being an only child whose father was incarcerated for most of his childhood and whose mother worked into the night. “I was in the dayroom, chillin’, playin’ cards/Now I’m outside, out the way, I’m drivin’ cars,” he raps in his husky voice and strong Atlanta wobble on “Cars.” On that same song, he strolls alone through Lenox Mall and treats himself to a solo dinner out.
If you haven’t noticed, it’s a wistful time in Atlanta rap right now. Back are the futuristic vibes, the snap beats, and instrumentals that sound like they could have been on Thug Motivation 101, both in the city and throughout the South. Yeah, nostalgia is everywhere, but this Atlanta run feels more sincere, an effect of a city that once had these thick regional lines become obscured by gentrification, the internet, and its own musical success. “We grew up here, but this ain’t our land anymore,” says an elegiac MexikoDro. Whatever is left of that feeling is being held onto in songs like “No Date,” pure trap music with an emphasis on the small moments that mean a little more when you’ve been through some shit.