For fans of the lyrical, of the poetic, and of the penned, Mike Floss has got something for you. For listeners leaning towards the beat-driven, the story-lined, and the anthemic, he’s got something even more to offer. The Tennessee rapper, who like many in the burgeoning Nashville creative underground is an exceptionally well-rounded artist that also pursues a social-oriented focus through the Black Nashville Assembly as a community activist fighting for Black governmental influence, is a safe-haven from the all-too-easy and rarely timeless trends that infect music and culture at large in the internet and social media age. Instead, Mike Floss and his new project are a hip-hop Oasis to his fans and to those new to discover him, exploring through only 15 minutes the exceptional depth of an artist within in a scene, too, that has so much more to offer.

 

Those offerings as tracks on Oasis are six, but broken down and immersed within, are innumerable. As a short EP should be, it’s a deep-diving exhibition on the complexities of his creative sphere, predominantly as a rapper with a whole lot to speak on. For Floss and through Oasis, that hip-hop palette emerges clearest through the traditional pillars of rap: the rhythm and the poetry; the written and the delivered; the thought-provoking, the emotion-evoking, and ultimately, the connected to. Oasis is first and foremost a collection of tracks tethered akin by the wide-ranging stylistic and thematic discourse at play by way of the fluidity of Floss himself, where a pointedly purposeful notebook of lines waterfall their way from beginning to Oasis end. Through that construct and in the paradigm of a musician putting their range on display through an idealized short, it’s a masterful EP serving as both an introduction and a reminder about who Mike Floss is to listeners old and new, respectively.

 

From its introductory moments, Floss adheres to the dynamism in his own story, weaving anecdotal tales into a larger framework of simple, factual self-statement. Just take the project’s opener, Never Ran and listen to Floss address a laundry list of things that he mostly won’t do, and the list of reasons why he won’t do them. ‘I ain’t going to church, I ain’t going to work, I ain’t chasing no hoes, and I changing my shirt…’ Floss begins before barreling further down a checklist of nopes that eventually turn to tentative maybes by the end of his wildly creative second verse. Unavoidably attention-grabbing and charismatically rebellious, it’s his defiant You Can’t Tell Me Nothin’ moment, and perhaps the strongest of ways through which to introduce himself and his Oasis.

 

From there, the project continues navigating the further reaches of his always lyrically led, yet stylistically wide-ranging exploration of hip-hop. Oasis’s second inclusion, Wipe Me Down is the kind of hard-hitting, bass-ridden hip-hop anthem that could soundtrack anything from the warm-up at a Titans game to late night rally at a house party. Defined, too, by the kind of fast-paced and thought-out penmanship that also delineates his most pointedly thoughtful poetry in motion, Floss marries the high-energy with the high-minded, flexing in the process, a knack for doing at once what very few rappers have ever been able to do even one-by-one. And then, he changes lanes again without ever losing grip of the woodgrain wheel. Fubu Forever draws undeniable reminiscence à la Jermaine Cole, where a poetic cascade of landscape-painting punchlines in verse immerses anyone listening in Mike Floss’s world before a closing bout of soulful vocal denouements. Local Satisfaction rides a piano-founded jazzy beat to the lyrical promised land, speaking effortlessly on a range of thoughts crossing Floss’s mind from track suits to feminism to his taste in cologne, while displaying in the process a case study on Southern tempo and cadence. It just feels like a Sunday drive Tennessee anthem. Higher Ground is a short but sweet self-affirmation. And Hangars, a closing celebration and further exhibition of everything that Mike Floss is capable of.

 

Welcome to the Oasis, and keep an eye out for more from the lyrical dynamo that is Mike Floss.