Stream Maino’s New Mixtape

Maino and J. Cole have nearly identical government names--Jermaine Coleman and Jermaine Cole, respectively--but on wax, they couldn't be farther apart. Where Cole has become a bankable Billboard workhorse through his populist college-radio raps, Maino is unrelentingly gutter, pausing only to find new enemies and sneer in their direction. The unflinching New Yorker returns today with his latest mixtape, King of Brooklyn 3. The 17-track set includes contributions from Kevin Gates, Vado, Uncle Murda, Dios Moreno, F School Telli, Tweezie, Money and the late Chinx. This comes less than a year after the second installment of the mixtape series, and more than three years after his last retail album, The Day After Tomorrow, hit shelves. The Gates-featuring "Fall" in particular is a standout, a hymnal for anyone who knows the price points on Pyrex.

Well over two decades after Chuck D dubbed hip-hop the CNN of the streets, Maino quite literally appeared on CNN to discuss the prison break that left two convicted murderers on the run. “[Prison escape] is a fantasy, it’s something that seems like it’s out of the movies,” he said at the time. “It’s something we don’t usually see, we don’t usually encounter stuff like that. Out of the seventy prisons in New York State, that’s one of the most secure…You’re never really alone to be able to move around to get free. I thought it was interesting when I saw the report yesterday. The first thing it reminded me of was The Shawshank Redemption.”