Wil May-"Got To Move"

photo taken by Maurice Garland on November 27th at King Plow Arts Center in Atlanta, GA


Wil May-"Got To Move"

This is a new joint from the homie Wil May. I finally got around to checking this out after hella tweets!

Some of you may have heard of him, some of you may not have. Pretty much, Wil is from Michigan, but went to school in Atlanta at Emory University. He was roommates with Asher Roth's manager and alot of folks on the streets feel that the whole college boy persona Asher had when he first dropped was directly borrowed from Wil. I mean, dude did have a project set to come out called The Frathouse Is Like A Frathouse long before Asher came with "I Love College"...and he was doing press photos in the "College" sweatshirt before Asher, but yeah...water under the bridge, anybody could buy the sweat shirt from Old Navy anyway.

Wil has been doing his thing for a hot minute. Back in '07 or so he had the club scene rocking with his songs "Bitch I Get Up Early," "The Juice" and "Just The Half." Matter fact, the first time I saw him perform was the same night I ever saw Hollyweerd and GripPlyaz perform too. I say that to say he comes from the same "scene" that started popping off here 3-4 years ago, but he was one of the first out of that "scene" to move away from Atlanta for a little bit, expose his music to others and come back with some game. Which may explain why you might not have heard Wil's name mentioned as much as the others in the circle and why he has been able to secure a joint venture for his Makeshift label with Grand Hustle.

Anyways...and Wil knows this, it took a second for me to warm up to his music. Loved seeing him perform, dude always had the star factor working for him, but it was definitely for those with an acquired taste. Wasn't necessisarly music I was gonna be riding to. I even remember being a part of a Creative Loafing consortium of sorts that wrote a piece on some of the new and up coming faces in Atlanta's music scene a while back (the article ruffled a few feathers) and I had to write about dude. I ain't say nothing bad about buddy, or anyone else for that matter, but we had to do this ranking thing and dude didn't take to kindly to the rank I gave him. So much that he reached out via myspace and we had a brief talk on either myspace or in the comments section about the article.

Ever since then I opened up to his music little by little just to see what was up. Late last year when he moved back from Cali, he let me hear his Frathouse project and the shit was pretty cool from what I remembered. He was simply doing him and seemed to find a nice balance that could possibly appeal to everybody.

So, that brings us to now and his new single "Got To Move." Shit is pretty cool to me. He produced it himself as he does the rest of his music. Its going to be interesting to see what comes out of his new situation with Grand Hustle because they haven't worked with an artist like Wil before. Sure they've worked with "different" artists over the last two years, but Wil doesn't really strike me as "different" in that regard, he just different from what that label is known for and is becoming known for. Who knows, Grand Hustle may be able to achieve some Kevin Rudoplh/Jay Sean/Cash Money type success.