Benny The Butcher Delivers Passionate and Motivational New Single "Did I"

Benny The Butcher and Griselda continue to run their respective victory laps after a 2019 campaign that saw the crew make a resounding statement about their place atop the hip-hop landscape. The year culminated in the group’s collaborative WWCD, a heavy-hitting must-listen that took the sound back to the genre’s golden era. Now Buffalo’s own Benny The Butcher returns with a standalone single “Did I” produced by Black Metaphor and Fuse of 808 Mafia.

The track is layered with a moving piano ballad contrasted by hard-hitting 808s and bass. The instrumental falls a bit outside of the traditionally gritty and nostalgic Griselda aesthetic, but still sets the tone for Benny’s reflective and aspirational bars. “Did I” marks his first solo release of the year and follows his feature on the cocaine-themed “Scrape the Bowl” by Boldy James and his performance on Jimmy Fallon with his Griselda brothers. Here, Benny recounts just how far he’s come in his hip-hop career in order to provide for his family, to put on for his city and to avoid federal indictments over the years.

Right out of the gate, Benny isn’t holding back, rhyming, “I bought my daughters flights to Cali just to keep ‘em out the cold/ You sell dope to feed your family, they gone treat you like you stole/ I took voluntary trips, I was proud of every brick/ For my n*ggas fightin’ them cases, droppin’ commissary slips/ Remember? I hustled reckless, hundred bundles in a simple stash/ ‘Cus I ain’t distribute bags to live middle class.” But perhaps the hardest rhyme on the release is, “Who hustle passionate as mines, all mumble rappers aside?/ My last sh*t made rappers humble as apple pie.”

“I’m from a legendary hood in Buffalo, Montana Ave, legendary hood,” Benny shared with HYPEBEAST during a Conversations With episode last year. “It’s birthed a lot of millionaires, hustlers, shit like that, just all the drug sales on the block. Just seeing that, that turned me and my ni*&as into go-getters. I was inspired by go-getters and I was watching them move and how they inspired people and I wanted to be that. Only thing is I learned how to do it outside the dope game also.”

Stream Benny’s latest offering and in more music news, Record Store Day 2020 has been postponed until June 20 due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis.