A film about Northwest hip-hop from

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Grey

In their annual year-end critics’ poll, The Seattle Times ranked Grey as one of the very best Seattle albums of 2020, saying:

Whether in the booth or on a canvas, Tacoma-area rapper/painter Perry Porter is one of the most consistent artists in the region. (Perhaps you saw his handiwork on Capitol Hill’s Black Lives Matter street mural or custom charity sneakers for Pete Carroll this year.) Here, the talented dual-threat teams with up-and-coming producer OldMilk, leaning more heavily into his cerebral side as he skates lyrical circles around gliding house beats (“Move My Feet”) and the soulful pitter-patter of lead single “Custom.”

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Bobby Ro$$

Bobby Ro$$ is a vibe-heavy hustle through the landscape of art, blackness, and self-love. On it, Porter inhabits a trap music avatar of the much-loved PBS painter and uses snippets of interviews with cultural luminaries such as Kara Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Maya Angelou as a narrative lattice to paint himself into the canon of black art. NPR calls him “A skilled rapper and a multimedia threat,” while Respect My Region says that “Perry Porter paints a masterpiece with his latest album.”

Here’s another take:

In their annual year-end critics’ poll, The Seattle Times ranked Bobby Ro$$ as one of the very best Seattle albums of 2019, saying:

Since the breakup of his rowdy mosh-rap group Sleep Steady, Perry Porter has established himself as one of Seattle-Tacoma’s unique talents through infectiously fun hybrid rap/live art shows. The charismatic rapper/painter (or is it painter/rapper?) looks and sounds increasingly comfortable grooving in his own watercolored lane on Bobby Ro$$, which arrived this summer with a track-by-track color wheel guide to match the variegated album’s many moods. The man can still annihilate a trap beat with the best of ’em (see: breathless five-alarm banger “Sink or Swim”) while alternately cooling down with beatific cuts like the closing “Watercolor,” which samples artist Kerry James Marshall discussing the dearth of “self-satisfied” Black people depicted through art. Porter, who often paints vibrant, bright-colored portraits of Black women, is refocusing the narrative while doing equally beautiful things with 808s and acrylics.

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