A South San Francisco Rapper Turned His Sneaker Collection Into an Album

San Francisco-born artist Paul Solis first fell in love with hip-hop and basketball as a youth who grew up on the Peninsula during the mall-going culture of the ’90s.

Back then, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah of the indomitable Wu-Tang Clan were two of the flyest humans to traverse the planet. With tri-colored Polo jackets, Nike visors, baggy jeans and wheat-hued Timberland stompers, the rappers helped to define a New York street aesthetic that is still heralded in fashion circles today. Meanwhile, saucy NBA players like Penny Hardaway, Jason Kidd and Charles Barkley began rocking signature pairs of Nikes and revolutionizing the way athletes could express themselves off the court.

Solis grew obsessed with it all, regularly visiting shops where he could baptize himself in the freshest gear. His go-to spot became Niketown on Post Street, where he would camp out overnight for sought-after footwear and apparel.

Solis — whose hip-hop nom de guerre is JustPaulNow — has stitched that energy into his most recent album, Swoosh Pack (named after Nike’s timeless insignia). 

The 11-track project is a sentimental look at the MC’s childhood fascination-turned-spending addiction. Each song is titled after a specific sneaker — or a sneaker-related memory — in Solis’ collection. The Devin Booker 1s. The Air Force 180s. The Uptempos.

Produced by New Zealand’s uber-smooth Kowhai, who connected with Solis online, Swoosh Pack features Union City battle rapper Fredo Algebra, Frisco spitter J-Billion and Solis’ longtime childhood friend, Charles “CeeRock” Ubungen.

The LP is a trademark collaboration with Ubungen, who is also a sound engineer and videographer. It’s not the homegrown duo’s first effort, though. Together, they’ve been dabbling in Golden Era, boom-bap music and showcasing the Peninsula’s fashion-driven subculture.

Music meets fashion at Shoot Your Shot Records

Solis and Ubungen have known each other since adolescence, and have been in the local circuit for decades. They’ve performed alongside national acts like Curren$y and The Cool Kids, and have established themselves as de facto Bay Area shopping plugs for artists on tour here.

In 2018, Solis and Ubungen co-founded Shoot Your Shot Records. Together, they run the independent label from a DIY studio located on the poetically named Victory Avenue in South San Francisco. It’s where they record music and film a live series called “Hat Chat” with Fredo Algebra, a fellow fashionista who designs baseball caps for streetwear boutiques around the country. When their crew isn’t making music, the rappers discuss the Bay’s latest fitted clothing releases and trends on YouTube. They also occasionally host pop-up events for exclusive drops at spots like Gallery 1985, an independent sneaker shop in Daly City.

Prior to Swoosh Pack, Solis delivered no shortage of fashion-forward albums like Arc’teryx To The Neck (a slick reference to the Canadian outdoor apparel company with a dash of Bay Area slang) and regionally popular singles like “Jordan Poole,” a former Golden State Warrior known for his drip.

Over six years, Shoot Your Shot has evolved into a multimedia platform for like-minded artists. Swoosh Pack is simply their latest, most polished offering.

‘The Nikes on my feet keep my cypher complete’

It’s easy for music about the halcyon days to get lost in a meaningless glorification of the past. What Swoosh Pack excels in, though, is balancing nostalgia with an intimate kind of reflection and vulnerability. The album is introspective and thoughtful in ways one might not expect for an album dedicated to branded footwear.

In “Campouts,” Solis references selling sneakers to pay rent and sipping E&J while camping out in Union Square to cop the Jordan Laser 4s and other lionized sneaker releases of yore. The rapper outlines an era of early MySpace, before you could just order UberEats and had to “camp out for kicks with the homies” to be a part of the culture. “Man, I really miss this thing of ours,” he croons on the hook, providing a window into the kind of human connectivity that feels absent today.

On the title track, Solis goes even further into his past. Slant rhymes like “Just me and my mom on those lonely nights / engulfed in pop culture as an only child” provide a depth that goes beyond a show of bravado and clout chasing. 

There are moments of levity and geeking out as well. On “Air Force 180s,” for example, Solis’s flow is simplistic, clean and to the point: “vintage mountain North Face with the ladder locks from 94 / two tone Rangers [fitted hat] when I step up to the batter’s box… keep a clean fade, Nike Air bubbles what I’m standing on.”

For the unenlightened, it may sound like a litany of gibberish. But for true sultans of coolness, Solis’ outline of individual style are a feast of references — like the ultra-specific fashion terminology of a throwback North Face jacket that features a certain kind of buttoning system for ultimate cold-weather functionality. 

By the album’s end, it’s easy to appreciate the rapper’s attachment to sneakers and fashion accoutrements as not simply material objects, but as artifacts of memory, of pride, of a time and place that hold power whenever he wears them. And we get to wear that power as listeners, too.