By Keegan Singh

Puerto Rican born rapper J.I the Prince of N.Y. is the second artist being featured on the ‘Artist Spotlight’ series. J.I. the Prince of N.Y aka Justin Irvin Rivera is an up and coming New York based hip-hop artist. He is more popular than the previously featured Rexx Life Raj but he is still extremely under-appreciated and underrated in my opinion. 

He started to gain traction after appearing on a popular TV series on the Lifetime channel called “The Rap Game”. In this series, he had to compete against other artists in rap challenges where his success led to him creating a Youtube channel. After the show ended, he released his first single called “No Static” on his Youtube channel, which amassed more than 500,000 views and showed his talent as an artist. “No Static” was released in 2016, but it wasn’t until 2019 that he was able to sign with a record label because of a few issues he encountered in his personal life. He got kicked out of his mom’s house after spending all the money he earned from the show on marijuana and he considered quitting rap because of it. Instead of quitting, he decided to connect with his current manager as a last attempt at the rap game. 

In Oct. 2019 he released a mixtape called “Hood Life Krisis Vol.1”. The mixtape contained his most popular song to date called “Need Me”. The song accumulated over 50 million views on Youtube as well as over 3 million streams on Spotify. The success of this song is what eventually led to J.I. signing a record deal with Interscope Records. The mixtape showed J.I’s versatility as an artist as well as his melodic ability. He’s able to melodically rap over both slow/soft and more upbeat beats. 

In addition to having a good voice, J.I. generates great bars in his songs which show his ability lyrically. He has only released two studio albums, “Hood Life Krisis vol. 1” and “Hood Life Krisis vol. 2” and is a part of a great crop of up and coming melodic New York rappers. In his short career, he has been able to get some big artists featured on his songs such as: Lil Tjay, Nav and Lil Durk. 

He also featured on Lil Tjay's latest album, “State of Emergency”. His music is quite explicit and heavily focuses on sex and life in the hood. Despite the explicit nature of the lyrics, J.I. is extremely talented and in my opinion will become one of the biggest rappers in the game very soon because of his melodic and lyrical ability. Some of the punchlines that he includes are very creative and any fan of Hip-Hop would enjoy his music. If you are not a fan of hip-hop music, his songs will take some getting used to but I would still recommend you give it a listen because the beats are very easy to like, especially his more upbeat songs. 

He doesn’t have as many songs as Rexx Life Raj does, so instead of 10, here are 5 of his songs I recommend listening to first: 

• Need Me 

• Hood Scars 2 (ft. Lil Tjay) 

• Love Scars 

• Painless 2 (ft. Nav and Lil Durk) 

• Love in the Club

J.I. the Prince of N.Y. is on the rise and even though he has had a lot of success as of late he is still criminally underrated as an artist. He is highly talented as an artist and is even starting to release songs mixing in his native language of Spanish. His lyrics are a lot more playful and he doesn’t cover serious topics like other hip-hop artists, but he is definitely worth the listen and I guarantee you will enjoy his music. If you check out J.I., head to my platforms as well.

You can follow Keegan on: 

Twitter: @Keegns 

Instagram: @Keegns 

Spotify: @Keegn

Itunes/Apple Music: @Keegn