Baltimore rappers have been getting some well-deserved national ink of late. Chief among them is the group Peso Da Mafia, whose hit from last spring, “Money Man,” and its prompt to do the Money Dance, blew up, pulling in 3.4 million views on YouTube, 586,000 SoundCloud plays, a co-sign from Orioles center fielder Adam Jones, and the honor of being named Song of the Year by the Baltimore Beat.
If you haven’t seen the video, which features an older woman doing the Money Dance on her rowhouse stoop, get caught up below.
On Wednesday, the group–members Shordie Shordie, Purp and Lor Dee–appeared on the site Genius.com to discuss the lyrics behind their anthemic hit. A particularly poignant came when Shordie Shordie unpacked the following verse: “My city / It’s a lot of killing / Trapping / you might call it dealing / My brothers with it / Boy they willing / Telling n—as how I’m feeling.”
“Our murder rate high,” he explained. “We don’t got nothing to do. You feelin’ me? The youth, it’s the youth, bro. They don’t got nothin’ to do. And basically our whole city is jumping into music. Once you jump out of high school, they jumpin’ onto music.”
But he also warned that with music, “everything don’t be for everybody.”
“And our city don’t understand that,” he continued, “so our murder rate go high, bruh, because don’t nobody understand stay in your lane.”
Watch the full video here.
They also dropped a sun-soaked video for their latest single, “Winning,” on the YouTube page of World Star Hip Hop. Check it out.
