Jonna Algarin
The emcee’s latest album, "One Night Only," features easygoing vocal hooks.
If you read up on Cousin Stizz, you’ll find writers often describe the fast-rising Boston rapper’s high school as “suburban.”
And that’s fair. Reading Memorial High School is about 16 miles from downtown Boston, tucked neatly into the northern part of the metro area.
But the term doesn’t fit for Stizz, who says his high school seemed “way out there.”
Well-to-do Reading was simply a different world from inner-city Boston, where Stizz, born Stephen Goss, grew up flirting with the kind of trouble kids find in tough neighborhoods. His mother gave him an ultimatum when he was in his mid-teens: enroll at Reading or go to military school.
That was an easy decision, Stizz says, and to this day he credits his time at Reading as a formative element of his hip-hop career. Not only is it where he discovered the music of Kid Cudi — a major influence he wouldn’t have heard in his home neighborhood, he says — but where he learned how to appeal to different people with different tastes.
“I got the best of both worlds. Like, I would go home and see what it’s like to be in the inner city. I’d see all the wrong and all the bad shit. And I’d go back to school and everything’s good. Nobody wants for anything. Everybody has everything,” he says. “That just gives you an understanding of people. I started to understand how people move, what people listen to [and] what people like, from everywhere.”
Stizz plays the High Noon Saloon Oct. 18. His new album One Night Only, is at once sleek and easygoing, with 13 tracks that pair the emcee’s singsong flow and knack for vocal hooks with gentle and melodic beats. Songs like “Switch Places” and “Paid” find Stizz engaging in a little good-natured boasting as synths dance around him. Later, the album’s best track, “Headlock,” benefits from a spirited guest verse by Offset of the Atlanta trio Migos.
Stizz’s previous two projects — 2015’s Suffolk County and 2016’s MONDA — featured beats that were more soulful and club-worthy. But he wanted the sonics of One Night Only to reflect his current situation. Stizz moved to Los Angeles at the beginning of the year and recorded the album there.
“I definitely went for a more vibey sound, just because of the life I’ve been living recently,” he says. “Being in L.A. and out of the ‘hood and everything like that. I’m signed now. Things are a little bit better financially. I’m just feeling good so I wanted to make that pop.”
To be certain, Boston isn’t known as a rap factory. It’s biggest success stories are probably Guru from Gang Starr (who hit it big after moving to New York) and underground journeyman Mr. Lif. And that may be why Stizz, 25, never really considered hip-hop a possible career path until a few years ago.
But freestyling with friends for fun eventually evolved into real rhymes and real songs. And Suffolk County earned solid reviews and an important co-sign from Drake, who danced to a Stizz song in a 2015 Instagram post. A record-label feeding frenzy ensued, and Stizz signed to RCA, saying the label reeled him in because of its “family vibe from day one.”
Now, he’s bringing his “unconventional” approach to big-time hip-hop, one he says is less concerned with the genre’s boundaries and traditions than many of his contemporaries. Whatever institutional knowledge Stizz lacks because of his late arrival to rap, he makes up for in raw creativity and irresistible style.
“Because I didn’t know any of that stuff, it was all just expression. Just how I felt and what sounded cool to me,” he says. “If it sounds good, I’ll just do it like that. And it just happened to work out.”
