96 Grand

Compton, Los Angeles County, CA · b. 1996 · FARA Records

96 Grand (Andre Coleman, b. 13 July 1996) grew up in Compton and got a record deal young — the kind of deal a nineteen-year-old signs because the ink and the excitement move faster than the fine print. He watched a song of his own get played all summer, watched the city mouth every word back to him, and still got told the backend hadn't cleared. Years of “we recoup” taught him the vocabulary of the industry from the wrong side of the desk — masters, recoupment, backend — long before he understood any of it actually belonged to him.

Real radio play, a real deal, and a real education in exactly how little of either translated into money in his pocket. By the time he met Trace and Keys, he'd already lived the first verse of “We Recoup” — the group became the place he could finally say it plainly. His influences run the West Coast conscious and gangsta-rap lineage that first taught the industry's economics the hard way — Ice Cube and N.W.A-era Compton storytelling, the business-literate bars of Jay-Z and Nipsey Hussle, West Coast G-funk reimagined for a harder, industry-critique register.

On stage he's grounded and deliberate — the elder in the room, the one whose bars carry weight because he's actually lived the exploitation the group raps about. Calm authority rather than volume. His stage name doubles as his birth year and the exact kind of sum that used to vanish into a “recoupment” column before he saw a cent, and he's the one who actually keeps The Recoup's real financial paperwork, only half-joking about it. Weathered, sharp, unshakeable.