Shoreline Mafia Breakup: Is the LA Rap Scene Falling Apart?

On the 7th of April, Shoreline Mafia member Fenix Flexin announced publicly on his Twitter that he’d be moving on from the group to pursue his own individual career.

What happened in turn was a series of events that shook the group even further. A close friend of the group, rapper Mac P Dawg, was tragically shot in Los Angeles a week or so later. OhGeesy said, perhaps unseriously, in his IG live that he was planning to quit rap and become a chef.

Although we don’t know what terms all members of the group are on currently, I’ll focus on the main point of this article: Shoreline Mafia are splitting.

Fenix Flexin and OhGeesy in Pressure

For those who don’t know, Shoreline has been a prominent player on the LA rap scene for a few years now, the majority of their music videos and tracks gaining tens of millions of views and streams. The group is made up of four members, OhGeesy, Fenix Flexin, Rob Vicious, and Master Kato. Or, was.

To me, their music provides a certain energy that most artists don’t seem to fuel their own songs with: of course, they have clean beats and a hard flow, but there’s something else there, as well. Since the group’s debut mixtape, ShorelineDoThatShit, they’ve shown us something far more important: community. People throughout LA can turn to Shoreline and see not only cultural connections, with OhGeesy representing the Mexican population through his membership and Fenix, Rob, and Kato representing the black community through theirs, but also something that translates to be even more important. These four take rap and run with it.

Every track they hop on has different lyrics, a different beat, sure, but shares one key thing: fun. You can tell that this is easy for them, something they do without stressing or overthinking. To put it simply, music comes naturally to them. And they take advantage of this talent and ability in every song, mixtape, and video they roll out. I’ve never seen so much diverse consistency in any other artist in the rap game. I know this sounds contradictory, but if you listen, I can bet money, Crocs, ice cream, or anything you want you’ll agree.

This is why I believe wholeheartedly the rap game is taking a loss with this split, but also potentially a few gains. Of course every Shoreline fan will feel this pain deep down, and so will the LA community, but there's really a chance here for each Shoreline artist to explore their own style and branch out (as we've seen Rob Vicious do in his new mixtape).

After the incarcerations of 03 Greedo and Drakeo the Ruler, Los Angeles’ new wave of rap may look like it has taken too many hits to recover, but there's definitely hope. We know how much talent and consistency these artists have, so who's to say they won't define a new era of rap by themselves?

All I can hope is that each individual Shoreline member will carry through the same energy they’ve shown us all these years and rebuild the broken rap scene that is their home.