In 2017, the rapper GoldLink was lamenting a vanishing Chocolate City and doing his part to try to preserve its culture. His album from that spring, At What Cost, treated Washington, D.C.'s local hallmarks like psychic landmarks in an effort to stave off the erasure he saw encroaching, brought on by the gentrification overtaking the area. "I feel like we're long overdue for our story to be told," he told The Washington Post. "If it doesn't happen now, then everything we had is going to be gone, and no one will ever know about it — it'll be like a lost city."
I was thinking about this idea while listening to Dirty Harry 2, the new mixtape from D.C. rapper El Cousteau. Eight years later, GoldLink's concerns are even more valid, and yet Cousteau's rise feels like an affirmation that the city's essence can never truly be lost. Spend a little time with his songs and it quickly becomes clear where he's from and how he takes that history with him. As his name implies, Cousteau is an explorer in his music, a jetsetter and live wire — "Spin around the world twice, came back with a straight face," he quips — but he's never too far from home. He's on Bladensburg Road from the first to the 15th ("85 South"), and he's locked in from uptown to Wheeler Road ("Nitro"). Listening to him rap, you get the sense that his passage is twofold: He is bringing D.C. to all his bucket-list destinations, and he is collecting trinkets on the road to bring home the stories they bear, the ride back always the more important one.
Cousteau often sounds between places, his verses animated and antsy as if eager to get somewhere, but objects in his rearview are closer than they appear. As a result of this time-dilated depth perception, he's just as likely to reminisce about packing a two-tone chrome, compact .40 1911 in high school as he is to lavish in taking his girlfriend to Venice for the weekend, decked out in Celine. Getting where you're going can mean leaving some things behind, and on "Ballad of France," from his 2024 breakthrough tape Merci, Non Merci, he raps about missing his grandmother's funeral while out on the road, trying to advance his career: "I be sad when I miss y'all phone calls 'cause I'm far away from home now." In a sense, his verses feel like an effort to resolve those connections, leaving voicemail recaps from inside his trajectory as he attempts to pay off his street-level education with a stamped passport.
Dirty Harry 2 immediately signals where Cousteau has been and where he's headed. On the opener, the rapper's voice is blustery as he notes that he is addressed as "sir" in label meetings now. He's just as brazen rapping about holding someone at gunpoint, or high speed chases, or his cousin coming home from the fed after six years. "You know where I'm coming from / Growing up in that corner house," he raps before declaring, "I'm a menace to society / I'm a product of my environment / Grew up around n****s selling dope, doing armed robberies," the scene playing like a modern twist on the crooked local tales of Wayne "Silk" Perry and Rayful Edmond.
The days of those traffickers running around D.C., mythologized by crime docuseries like American Gangster, are long past, and yet, in recent weeks, the District has been under a kind of domestic siege as the result of such a fantasy. On Aug. 11, by executive order, the Trump administration put local police under federal control, bringing in federal law enforcement from agencies such as the U.S. Park Police, DEA, FBI, ATF and U.S. Marshals Service, with the stated purpose of cleaning up a "crime emergency." "There will be no safe harbor for violent criminals in D.C.," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, adding that the increased presence was intended to protect innocent citizens. (As many noted in response, violent crime in D.C. had been at a 30-year low.) There is something striking about listening to a D.C. native rap about being a product of the city's crime amid a militant anti-crime push, as an on-the-ground survey of the streets currently under scrutiny. In Dirty Harry 2, you can hear what it's really like to live with crime, to be taken by both the drama and reality of it, to move on from it, and to not let it sully your love for home.
Cousteau, for his part, has been unambiguous about using his music to unpack a complicated upbringing. "The complexities of life be so crazy sometimes, like it gets to the point where the world be needing a motherf***** with a perspective that just doesn't have no bulls***," he said last November. "I ain't about to give you no gimmick, none of that s***. I'm going to just talk to you about life. I'm going to tell you my flaws and all that s***. … That same honesty and empathy in my music helped me grow too."
That mandate is clear on Dirty Harry 2, as is the growth. The project feels uniquely urbane, chic and worldly, without losing any of its homegrown charm. Cousteau is a modern dandy with a carefully curated aesthetic, having modeled for Telfar and Wales Bonner and aligned himself with fellow fashion killa A$AP Rocky. Creatively, he's fallen in with new-age sages of lo-fi hip-hop like Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, summoning their approaches and palettes (compact music — 13 songs, 28 minutes — and busy, full-bodied loop production), but his flows are possessed by the distinctive run-on energy of DMV street rap and have a flair for the flamboyant. The style generated by this fusion is a swanky, snappy kind of goon talk, adrenalized yet concentrated, verging on mumble rap. "This pen I got establish a lifestyle, comes fully furnished," he raps on "Straight to It." Few can make being a roughneck sound so positively pimped out.
At times, it can feel like Cousteau is rapping specifically about the D.C. that the president is imagining. On "Words2LiveBy," the Earl-featuring standout from Merci, Non Merci, he rapped, "I'm in Northeast where it's unsolved murders." Dirty Harry 2's "Quid Pro Quo" is marked by ruthlessness: "Feel like everybody against me and ours," goes one bloody-eyed line. Pay closer attention, though, and you'll hear someone who has internalized the Darwinism of the hood. Drug money helped his mom buy his school clothes, he explains. D.C. isn't a place he is trying to escape; his city-hopping adventures are not an outlet but an effect, the result of all his enterprising. He carries and is carried by his hustler's spirit, and he makes the case for it rather plainly on "Rose Ave.": "To afford the cost of living, that's what a n**** do crime for."
But Dirty Harry 2 is about more than just getting it out the mud to live in the lap of luxury; it's about knowing that home has instilled him with resolve, and that the journey bears all the hard lessons. "Hotel in Los Angeles, I'm from the capital, fifteen minutes from the trenches," he raps on "A Good Laugh," his murmurs cutting through the wailing sample. On "Bergamot," he's even more direct: "You should be proud of me / What I did from what I was given / Reflect on my past like that / Talk about the downside like it's the good stuff." The song is all about the grind, working smarter, being spurred by doubters and reaping the rewards afforded by resilience — but in this moment, he stews in the nuance for a second. Rappers have a way of turning tragedy into triumph, and Cousteau's evolution is presented as a byproduct of a glass-half-full outlook. The mask slips for just an instant before he snaps back to nonchalance: "No reason to point any fingers / We won't get into that s*** tonight."
Dirty Harry 2 was released on Sept. 10, the same day that the emergency powers allowing for D.C.'s federal takeover expired. As of now, there has been no significant withdrawal on the ground: Armed National Guardsmen still stalk street corners and Metro stations, and ICE continues its patrols. Chocolate City is familiar with aggressive policing, and Cousteau's perspective feels representative of the fortitude displayed up and down Bladensburg and Wheeler Roads. When he turns back to the grind after his brief spell of ambivalent reflection, talking about the downside like it's the good stuff, it feels almost quintessentially D.C., especially now. Just like the city and its natives, Cousteau is perpetually, uneasily, soldiering on.
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